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.

Comments

Trademarks

[mattdm]

Ok, first of all: this is basically a good ruling.

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 /. article above gets them mixed up. Everyone complains a lot when the general media can't understand the concept of hacker/cracker/script-kiddie -- it seems like we could get things like that right here!)

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