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The Worldwide Domain Battle
pledibus writes "The New York Times's Sunday magazine contains an interesting article, Get Out of My Namespace, about the spate of conflicts over website names. The author synthesizes ideas from computer technology, law, history, onomastics, cultural anthropology, and probably a few other areas, and does a pretty nice job of it."
Impossible to police, impossible to control, and totally against everything the Net was designed to be. Sorry, but no country will govern the net and if one should try to, they will have a huge problem on their hands. What is needed is not more regulation, but more insightful systems design. That's all.
...they should be unambiguous and consistent. It shouldn't be based on who has the biggest lawyers.
Perhaps the problem is that the internet is too massively large for the human mind, social systems, and trademark laws to handle. Everyone thinks they are coming up with a unique, non-overlapping, name from everyone else. But once the system becomes too larger, very few names are unique. In reality, all the "good" names are taken and even all the easy variants of the good names are taken. Its a case of too many people and too few names.
The case of confusing/typoed near-names (ggle.com) is also a human scalability problem. If one only interacted within a tribe or small group (say 100 individuals), a typo or near-name would still be unambiguous.
People (and their social/legal systems) weren't designed to connect directly to millions or billions of others.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Trademarks are not assigned to promote the creation of interesting individual names. Otherwise, they would fall under the "promote the useful arts and sciences" clause of the constitution, and thus would have limited duration.
Trademarks exist forever, as long as they are actively used -- because their enforcement puts MORE information at the public's finger tips, not LESS. The purpose of trademarks is not to defend some "property" of the long-dead guy who named Colt firearms, but to defend YOUR right to know who made the products you buy, right here, today.
As such, they can be as ugly or common place as you want. The point is to stop other people from confusingly marketing a similar product under a similar mark. Trademarks are actually a consumer-protection issue, not an "intellectual property" issue. It is the confusion of lumping very different aspects of law into one vague name that leads to mistakes such as this.
I don't think I am nit-picking here. This is a serious mistake. The misuse of trademarks for the purpose of censorship or harassment would be much less common if the general public had a sense that trademarks "belonged" to THE PUBLIC, as a truth-in-labeling concept.
Right -- notice how a big company needs to be engaged in commerce to hold the trademark, and the ICCAN / WIPO Nazis then turn around and use any commercial activity by a little guy as evidence of bad faith.
That would be silly. A lot of the interesting technical info I have found is on individuals' home pages, not on the pages of corporations (many of whom are only interested in putting up annoying content-free flash animations).
I'd argue that companies with famous brands should get the least amount of protection possible. This is simply because;
.com anymore? You either look on their products for their URL, or you google for it. We all learnt to do this the hard way (whitehouse.com).
1) if their brand is so valuable, why don't they pay the schmoe who registered their domain what it's worth?
2) BigCorp can blast its URL over many communications, like commercials, logoes, branding, etc.; obviously, having an easy-to-remember URL is more important for those less fortunate.
3) Do you even type in a company's name and append
4) If a website is actually confusing consumers, or commiting libel; sue em. Don't need no UDRP. If it's too cosrly to sue some-one operating in alaska, well, then your brand isn't famous enough, get yourself a country (ccTLD) domain name.
The whole ICANN/UDRP/WIPO trademark circus is a big joke. Especially when they took away the possibility to register domain names (for free..) in the nice hierarchical XX.us state (sub)domains.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
The problem is that many corporations and brands are multinational. A corporation may be legally registered and operating in dozens of countries, not to mention many more countries where their products are sold. The company's headquarters may be in the United States, but the majority of its employees and facilities may be overseas.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
So, for, example, if my last name was Ford, and I made, say, house paint, and I registered fordhousepaint.com, Ford Motor Company shouldn't get to do jack shit. No consumer in the world, no matter how low their IQ, is going to purchase my house paint and then claim confusion and think they were getting a car. However, if Ford didn't have a website, and I registered Ford.com, and just had a parked page there, it would be pretty clear that I was doing it in the hope of extorting money from Ford.
Now, there are some corner cases, as always. The MikeRoeweSoft thing is very unusual. Mike Roewe was his real name, and he did have a software company. Does it sound the same as another Redmond, WA company? Yes. However, it was pretty clear from the site that he wasn't Bill Gates, and the odds that some consumer would hear about the real microsoft, and want to go to their website, yet not know how to spell their domain name, and came up with MikeRoeweSoft on their own - well that's pretty slim. Personally, I think he should have won that case.
And, using the Ford example from above, if my last name was Ford, and I registered ford.com, and on it I had a huge website, with pages for every member of my family, and a history of the family, and all my relatives had @ford.com e-mail addresses, and then Ford suddenly decides they want to cash in on this e-commerce thing and sues me, well that's a sticky situation. Technically, I was there first, and I'm clearly not pretending to make cars, nor am I interested in selling them my domain name for any price, and technically, they're not Ford either, they're Ford Motor Company. But I guess I don't have a good solution for that situation.
Really, two important things would have prevented this whole problem:
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