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Re: [ga] List of Domain Names

  • To: debbie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Subject: Re: [ga] List of Domain Names
  • From: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:24:21 -0700


On 06/15/2010 10:59 AM, Debbie Garside wrote:

Let's not exacerbate the privacy catastrophe that has been
created by ICANN's submission to the trademark industry.

What submission?

Not "submission" in the "I submit this document to you" sense.

Rather, "submission" as practiced in the South of Market part of San Francisco, as in the opposite of "dominance" - often involving leather and whips.

I am on both sides of these issues (the trademark issues, not the "submission/dominance" issues ;-) - I and my company own several US registered trademarks that we monitor and defend. On the other hand I am routinely aroused at all hours of the day, weekdays and weekends, by telemarketers who are calling using telephone numbers that have been obtained by data mining whois. And I get several thousand spams a day to addresses that exist only in my registration information, again gleaned by mining of whois.

The hypothetical threats that trademark people carry on about are Chicken Little tantrums that their sky is falling. Much of that whining is about uses of names that are lawful uses - even the Nike company has to give way to the Greek pantheon and that famous winged statue from Samothrace (sp) that's at the top of a staircase at the Louvre.

It has long been my position that a trademark owner who wants to look into whois ought to be required to state, in writing onto a permanent and public record, his/her name and accusation, backed by concrete statements of supporting evidence, why he/she believes that the accused domain name owner is violating an owned trademark or some other right that is possessed by the person seeking access.

        --karl--





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