I strongly agree with INTA's proposal regarding a "famous mark"
and further recommend that a second-level domain name which
is internationally recognized as a trademark in commerce which
is done offline should de facto be granted internet trademarks,
for the company's name if recognized by trademark and reason-
able variations thereof including and limited to the use of digits,
hyphens, capital or lowercase letters and/or an underline mark,
whereby the length of the SLD is no longer than it would be
with the use of hyphens or underline marks AND variations for
digits and letters do not extend the length of the trademark. I
am familiar with two specific instances in which companies are
using the trademark as their SLD for one of the world's largest
companies in imaging, but they have absolutely nothing to do
with that company. This creates several problems, the least of
which include misrepresentation and inability to provide informa-
tion, products and services of the company known by the trade-
mark name. There must be international governing legislation.
INTA's proposal as I understand it specifically refers to any firm
or other organization that has an active web site in a specified
country and is using a trademark as their SLD should be granted
that SLD under any TLD in the same country. What I am stipulating
is that this should, under the agreements of the 165 or so coun-
tries participating in the proceedings with known country codes,
extend to all applicable domains in all participating countries. As
a result there would be no need to have each company register
their trademark in every country and would allow them adequate
time to develop an online presence and assume the trademark
name as their SLD once that presence was ready. As it stands, a
company must develop a site in order to even apply for the SLD
to secure it as their trademark. This does not make sense.
If I were to visit 'cocacola' in Russia, for instance, I should see an
official Coca-Cola web site OR a pre-formatted page as is current-
ly being done by several countries such as Denmark that says a
"famous mark" has already been reserved, despite the fact that a
company with that "famous mark" does not have an active site in
the respective country. Moreover, there is no good reason why
a company not associated with the firm owning the trademark
should be allowed to use that trademark, unless we are resolved
that everything will be done on a first-come, first-serve basis. For
an example, see www.danish.net and look up company URL's to
see if you can find one that does not yet have a 'co.dk' site.
Our company is currently viewing how to resolve this problem,
and looks forward to further information and updates regarding
policy decisions. The name of the company has been left out of
this submission intentionally because of intellectual property law
discussions that may be adversely affected were the companies
acting in ill regard to view this. Thank you for your attention to
these stipulations.
Any comments are welcome to my school e-mail account which
gets forwarded to me overseas automatically.
Kind regards,
Richard H. Epstein, Webmaster
Advertising Division, Internet Group
Graduate Intern & Degree Candidate
International Marketing and Japanese
Master of International Business Studies
The University of South Carolina, Columbia
E-mail: epsteim8@mibs.badm.sc.edu