Re: [ga] A TLD for Trademarks

["kidsearch" <kidsearch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think they need that Danny. First of all, domain names were never
meant to represent trademarks.

When you register a trademark, you have to specify the field that the
trademark will be used in, such as "entertainment television show" "clothing
and apparel" "automobiles", etc.

A trademark gives you permission to use the chosen word or phrase to market
your particular product. It does not give one ownership of that string of
letters.

An example "Nissan". You can argue all you want about famous marks, but if
my name is Nissan and I want Nissan.tshirts as my domain in the tshirt tld,
I not onle have the right to own that domain name, but I can also register a
trademark, because it will not be in the same category as the automobile
manufacturer's trademark.

The simplest way to protect people's trademarks is to allow the creation of
all types of tlds. So Nissan.auto or Nissan.car if registered by anyone
other than Nissan, the automobile manufacturer, would easily be recognized
as a trademark infringement, whereas Nissan.guitars would not be. There is
also something to be said for car lots to be able to register the domain
names Nissan.car or Nissan.auto if they sell Nissan cars. That is also not a
trademark infringement IMHO.

By creating specific tlds, it would be easy to protect your mark without
giving trademark holders ownership of entire strings of letters that even a
trademark does not give you legally.

Trademark enforcement has been implemented on the Internet more stringently
than it ever was pre-Internet. The USPTO only gives you "permission" to
"use" that string of letters relating to marketing your product in a
"specific" geographical area and it limits it to a specific category of
product.

When you apply for the mark, the contract does not say you "own" the string
of letters. Nowhere in the USPTO agreement does it also guarantee you all
domain names that contain that string of letters.

Again, a phone book approach or a USPTO category approach to tlds would
suffice to protect the "limited" rights that mark holders have.

.printers .pcs .stereo .cars .clothing,.etc. and ICANN doesn't need to set
this up. Let the market do the talking. If there is a need for .cars and
others, someone will create it and it will take care of trademark protection
all by itself. Only famous marks would be protected in .com, .net, .org and
other generalized tlds. All trademark holders would be protected in the tlds
that are specific to the categories they hold marks for.

Chris McElroy aka NameCritic
http://www.WhoLetTheBlogOut.com



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Danny Younger" <dannyyounger@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 2:20 PM
Subject: [ga] A TLD for Trademarks


> Interesting.  In support of a TLD for trademarks --
> From Frederic Wallenberg's "Short Paper 2":
>
> Excerpt:  "I will first describe my general solution
> to the issue at hand and will thereafter look at
> special considerations for famous marks. My solution
> relies on four changes. First I will propose a change
> to the domain name system to accommodate all trademark
> holders. For this change to be useful, we need to make
> changes to the domain name server infrastructure and
> change some functionality in the browsers used by web
> users. This change in turn will require some change in
> user behavior to be effective. While the solution
> isn't without cost, it does have the opportunity to
> solve the problem we're currently facing.
>
> Changes to the Domain Name structure
>
> The main idea is to allow all legitimate trademark
> holders (under any legal regime) to secure their
> trademark as a second level domain. To facilitate this
> on a worldwide basis, it would be desirable to have
> one unique TLD for trademarks."
>
> http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~fredrik/courses/cyberlaw/A%20New%20DNS.pdf
>
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