Re: [ga] Trademark-free TLDs
On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, Danny Younger wrote: I have submitted a proposal for Trademark-free TLDs to the public comment forum: You are starting from the wrong premise - there is nothing about any TLD that creates a free-fire zone for trademark holders to gun down anybody and anyone they feel impinges on their self-proclaimed right to expand trade/service mark law to the starts and beyond. Yet that is what you are suggesting - that except for a few reservations (sort of the internet analog to the kind of geographical reservations that North American and South African aboriginal groups were confined into) - trademarks on the net are to be construed as dominating and superseding any other right. Absent specific use it is really hard to find that a registration in a TLD of a sequence of characters violates any legislated regime of trade/service mark. I might have "hummer.tld" and it doesn't rise to actionable impingement unless I actually use it in some way in commerce that infringes on the rights of General Motors. The simple bottom line is that *all* TLDs are subject to the laws of trade/service marks. And equally, no TLD should go beyond the limits of legislated laws (the UDRP being an obvious case of a non-legislated law) to increase the rights of mark-holders, and thus reduce the rights of non-mark holders (it's a zero-sum situation). --karl--
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