Re: "Claiming" a TLD

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

> No - a service mark is the marriage of a word or phrase (or image) with
> a specific product. Now, one cannot copyright a 
> word like EARTH or USA, but one can have those a service marks for
> domain registration. AGN-DNS has 3 service
> marks for its top level domain service: .EARTH(sm), .USA(sm) and .Z(sm)
> 
> John

Ok, but one could argue the case that *your* so called top level domain
service exists only within your service, as it's invisible (practically)
to others.
Should IANA decide to add ".EARTH" to the root, it would certainly not be
touching your inside service, as those who could see your EARTH before would
still see it, and those who didn't, wouldn't.
Then again was it Burger King that lost when trying to sell Big Macs? (which
would give more fuel to you as an oportunist).
Maybe you could keep .Z, but I'm sure that no U.S. court would be happy with
you "claiming" .USA let alone the whole EARTH...
I guess in any case, that this will stay as speculation, as I don't see any
need for any of those TLDs, so my guess is that you won't find a "challenge"
for them.
Anyhow (as mentioned countless times), nobody is stopping you from telling
the world how great your registry is, and nobody is stopping the world from
pointing at your servers, after finding out how great they are...

<cynical mode>
Oh, you mean you *are* telling the world how great your registry is, and (as
you point out so often) have been doing so for a long time?
Hmmm, then maybe the world doesn't think that your registry is such a hot
idea, because you certainly *have* been bashing at it for a while...
</cynical mode>

Yours, John.