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Domain Registrars Not Legally Responsible for Domain Names
mike_markley writes " CNN has an article that talks about a suit that Lockheed Martin filed against NSI over a domain that allegedly infringed upon Lockheed's copyrights. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals decided that NSI wasn't responsible for trademark infringements such as this. " Good - the Court's basis was recognizing the need for registrants to move with speed, unlike the trademark office.
But, it doesn't address the underlying problem -- trademarks and domain names don't mix. Paramount, for example, has a trademark on the letter Q. Don't use that in your domain name! In fact, basically every word you can think of is someone's trademark. If that means that they have the exclusive rights to any domains containing that word, the whole system is going to break.
I'm not sure what the fix is: trademarks are a pretty good basic idea. But they were meant to work within specific areas of commerce, and be limited geographically. It doesn't scale up to a national level, let alone a worldwide one -- and it gets even worse when companies of totally different types are in competition for the same ".com" domains.
(A side note -- I don't mean to be pedantic, but trademark is very different from copyright. The
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Apropos to this, HR1225 was up for discussion in the U.S. House today. If it's not a law now, it will be very soon. This is a law with bi-partisan support that establishes trade-marked names and phrases in domain names as falling under similar, if not the same, rules as trade marks in any other published form.
Personally, what I fear the most about this bill, after having heard a few congressmen talk today, was the perspective these representatives are taking. Their concept of names and other trade-marked items as possitions that others are not allowed to have, though highly entrenched in the current system, seems so much more of a broken view to me than the notion that trade marks are more of a formation of identity, so that unathorized use of trademarks is a forging of identity and misleading of consumers rather than appropriation of property.I'm curious to hear if the practical effects of current laws could be the same under this newer view point, as it would certainly seem to make future changes easier.
-hm
It seems to me that if there is a dispute over some trademark and both parties have a claim to the trademark in some domain, they should both be required to disambiguate and neither should retain the plain name.
So, instead of a dispute over "apple.com", both the record company and the computer company might have to pick more specific domains: "apple-computer.com" and "apple-records.com", with "apple.com" unassigned or possibly a directory of companies with "apple" in their name.
Sometimes, the distinguishing identifier would not (just) be the product but the geographic area. In tat case, the ".us" could be used, or it could get added to the domain name: "acme-paints-nyc.com", or "acme-paints.nyc.ny.us".
The key point is that neither party in a dispute should own the ambiguous domain name and both should be required to disambiguate. Note also that this does not require any technical or administrative infrastructure; the disambiguated domain names don't need to be in a hierarchy or follow any particular naming convention, they simply must distinguish the disputed trademarks clearly.
The GNU website reports that the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that, if passed, is guaranteed to make us go through more of these nonsense lawsuits.
Why don't people realize that domain names were never intended to be identified with any sort of trademark? To refresh your memories, the domain name system was introduced so that we wouldn't have to remember awkward IP addresses. But it looks like this reason has been totally forgotten/ignored in the mad rush to "appropriate" a piece of the web.
I, for one, hate this attitude of rushing to register every damned domain that you can lay your hands on. Lots of these companies/trademark holders go on a wild spree, not only registering their trademark in all the TLDs (top level domains), but also registering all sorts of variations of their trademarks, including typographical errors, misspellings, etc. Most registrars actually encourage this! I am appalled. The .com domain has become totally corrupted with all sorts of websites that can hardly be described commercial. Same goes for the other TLDs.
Stop the trademark-domain crap already!
Sreeram.
- Make a new domain: .tm.us .us domain, so US law can be applied (.com shouldn't be subject to US trademark law, it was intended for international use)
- Only US trademark holders can register in this domain
- It's part of the