Re: Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words

[Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <ocl@gih.com>]

On Jan 12, 21:47, Carl Oppedahl wrote:

> Your point that "united" is not a coined word, and is in fact a word out of
> the dictionary, is an important one.  Whoever happens to register
> "united.com" first should get to keep it if they wish, and no one should be
> able to take it from them.

We're in complete agreement. And I really believe that this reduces the
total number of so-called trademark disputes by a large percentage,
simply because there are already stringent guidelines in place about
trademarks.

> >Later on you mention "Pepsi". Pepsi is really "Pepsi-Cola" and the company
> >is "Pepsico", a coined word. -> pepsi-cola.com or pepsico.com
> 
> Here I disagree a little.  "Pepsi" is not "really" "Pepsi-Cola".

Well, this again is a trademark and patent attorney issue, and yes,
on second thought, and it is explicitely mentioned in trademark
rules, if the brand is such that it strongly represents a product,
it will stand-up in court. One would have to be pretty dumb to
start-up a company and call it Pepsi anyway.

We agree on the Coke issue, although I am not knowledgeable enough about
that case to comment on whether "Coke (R)" is a registered trademark, or
whether what's trademarked is really the artwork of "Coke" writing.
An interesting recent case was the battle fought between Richard Branson's
"Virgin Cola" which looked too much like "Coca Cola" - just the feel of
the packaging , the style of the writing etc. was being attacked by the
Coca Cola Company.

> >You comments about "Pontiac" (a coined word) stand, and I agree with them.
> 
> Nope.  Pontiac was the name of a Native American chief, over two centuries
> ago.  See
> <http://www.csulb.edu/gc/libarts/am-indian/nae/chapter_1/001_002_1.53.txt>.
>  Query whether the auto maker obtained rights to the name from the
> decendants of that person.

That's something for them to sort-out with their lawyers, really, isn't it ?

There is one thing which I would like to add - the case of trademarks held
by two independent organisations, for different fields of activity. Let me
take an example: Thomson Holidays, and Thomson Multimedia. Thomson holidays
is a pretty well known travel agent company in the UK. Thomson Multimedia
is a pretty large French electronic company (they own RCA).
The suggestion that the two would clash names on the Internet is, IMHO,
misguided. One should take thomson-holidays.com and the other should take
thomson-multimedia.com . And first-come-first-served should take thomson.com.

My point is that in the IAHC proposal, I can detect some unease towards
having to tackle the issue of trademarks. It's a bit like someone is pushing
for them to be addressed, and others are reticent to do so. This is giving
rise to the half-baked idea of a 60 day notice prior to the publication of
a domain-name. I just cannot understand why this issue is not kept completely
out of the Internet arena ! Infringement of trademarks has taken place ever
since the concept of a trademark was born, and the Internet is not a cause
of trademark infringements - it is a media by which trademark infringements
are publicised faster than by any other means prior to the Internet's existence.

The Internet not being the cause of infringements, I do not see why it should be 
restricted by rules which IMHO will slow-down its growth.

I would like to remind everybody here that an Internet Year is 3 months long.

60 days is 2/3 of an Internet Year. Ouch!


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Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond  |----------> Global Information Highway Limited
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