Re: 60 day waiting period

["Leo Smith" <barter@ntplx.net>]

Leo Smith wrote to Carl Oppendahl
> >Carl...While your suggestion that URL stability is more important than
the
> >interests of any one impatient domain name applicant may be reasonable,
> >you're conclusion offers no insight on the issue at hand. The issue is
not
> >"the impatience of one URL applicant". Instead it is about the
impatience
> >of 796,000 collective URL applicants who, if they had been able to
register
> >with no wait, would still have encountered no trademark challenge. Even
> >without the wait, these 796,000 URLs (representing 99.95% of the entire
> >.com Internet URLs), would have enjoyed the stability you advocate. 
To which Carl replied 
> Again, you are committing the fallacy of 100% hindsight.  The 796,000
> domain name owners don't know, until years later, that they didn't
> encounter a trademark challenge.  It's like the people who buy fire
> insurance for their house, and twenty years later they find out that
their
> house didn't burn down.  Does this mean they gained no benefit from
having
> paid the insurance premiums?

To which Leo replies:
There is no fallacy in 100% hindsight. That's exactly what insurance
companies use when the actuary determines the premium rate. 
Whether to take out insurance is, with a few exceptions, a decision made
exclusively by the insured, after the insured weighs the risk of loss, the
value of the potential loss, and the cost of insurance. Flight Insurance
may offer very low payout  on each spent insurance dollar, but is available
for each airline passenger to secure or not secure prior to departure. It's
an option...it's not mandatory. When insurance becomes mandatory, the
interests of the insured are secondary to the interests of third parties.
The homeowner may be REQUIRED to carry fire insurance as a condition of the
mortgage to protect the bank's interests. A car owner may be REQUIRED to
have collision insurance as a condition of operating the vehicle, so as to
protect the interests of others that may suffer injury as a result of the
driver's negligent operation of the vehicle. The warehouse lease may
REQUIRE that the lessee take out insurance, and name the lessor as an
insured party...to protect the interests of the lessor.

In all cases where insurance is mandatory...the interests of third parties
are deemed paramount (the interests of the mortgage grantor, the innocent
driver, etc). It is no different here when we look at the insurance in the
form of  the 60 day wait. 

In a system where "insurance", in the form of  the 60 day wait, is
compulsory, the interests that seek protection are the interests of the
trademark rights holders. You certainly don't see URL holders clambering at
the gate to obtain one of these 60 day wait insurance policies for their
own peace of mind....
If I were offered the OPTION of a 60 day wait, I would  weigh the risk of
potentially loosing my URL in a trademark dispute, the cost to me if the
loss occurred, and the cost of insurance (waiting 60 days), and the
effectiveness of the insurance vehicle to protect me from the potential
loss. I might even check the Trademark computer list being set up by Betty
Schafer at http://www.trademark.org/tmindex.html

Leo Smith
860 668 4000