At 10:22 AM 6/29/2000 +0530, Yep's wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Sanjeev Gupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 7:33 AM
>
>
> > Exactly. And the Trademark owner has made an investment in the name,
> > generating goodwill, and he has every right to expect the cyber squatter
>to
> > pay heavily for his name. Make sense? Me neither.
>
>The Internet is a total different entity in this world and therefore should
>be treated as a world where things run differently. Therefore if I have
>registered domain names www.ghane.com, www.ghane.net etc. etc. ;-) Then I
>expect you to pay heavily for your domain name as long as I am doing nothing
>to damage your goodwill etc.
Exactly. The critical part is "nothing to damage your goodwill".
The article states:
"In Titan Industries Limited v. Prashanth Koorapati & Others, the former,
the Indian owners of the trademark TANISHQ, which had become well-known for
jewelry and watches, filed a suit for passing-off and sought a permanent
injunction restraining Prashanth Koorapati from using their registered
domain name "tanishq.com" on the Internet."
The relief sought was specifically for "passing-off", masqurading. Ant the
court said:
"The Delhi High Court issued an ex parte ad interim injunction restraining
Prashanth Koorapati from registering a name, or operating any business,
manufacturing, selling or offering for sale, or advertising any goods under
the name TANISHQ or any other name deceptively similar thereto; or
including the word TANISHQ as an essential feature of a domain name on the
Internet; and from conducting any activities with the name TANISHQ that may
lead to passing off the business and goods of Prashanth Koorapati as those
of Titan."
Again, the relief was that Mr Koorapati can not use the the tanishq.com
site to pass off his stuff as that of TITAN, there is no injunction to not
register the domain or use it to sell books.
>So if I register the domain name and do nothing then will I still be
>separated from the domain name just because I haven't put any material and
>have just one HTML page saying website is under construction?? Won't the
>courts still take that as an impingement on the "goodwill" of the company
>since I haven't put any material on the website??? Now isn't that unfair? I
>mean I can't put any material on the website and I can't keep it empty
>too??? So what can I do, donate it to the comapny as charity?
No, use it for products that do not impinge on me. Eg, register ghane.net,
but don't claim it is mine. Under current law, if you put up a ghane.net
site which talks of travel in Nepal, I can't get an injunction. 2 reasons:
I can't prove I had prior goodwill about Nepal
I can't prove I had prior goodwill at all ;-(
> > My point is that these cases are well handled under current law.
>
>Well, I don't know about the British but the Indian Court well *sigh*
>.............
I repeat. The case sets no new precedents. It is not even an extension of
existing case law, it is well within centuries-old Copyright and Trademark
law. Really.
The point is not "will the courts regulate the InterNet", but "will the
courts protect me in the InterNet". Anti-defamation law has been carried
over, publishing has, copyright protection exists for web pages, why not
goodwill protection?
-- Ghane
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