Kent,
{ > Seriously, by any concept of 'intellectual property,' the cybersquatters
{ > are in *exactly* the same business as the TM holders: trying to
{ > capitalize on the alphabet.
{
{ That's simply stupid. The businesses of TM holders are myriad, from
{ running a restaurant to making soft drinks to building space
{ shuttles. The business of cybersquatters is trying to sell names
{ they got under false pretenses, and frequently don't pay for.
{
{ It costs several hundred dollars and takes a year or more to get a
{ trademark. People simply don't run around trademarking good names
{ and then trying to sell them. Instead, people get trademarks to
{ protect the identity of their real business. Protection of business
{ identity is the whole point.
{
It's easy to miss the point sometimes, so let me try again:
weve got group A, which has physical-world connections which we might
call 'fundamentals': trade, goodwill, inventory, etc etc. Weve got group
B, which has virtual-world connections to certain domain names.
The A's have been around for a hundred years longer than the Bs, and have
developed a certain amount of trade law/ lore for the resolution of
disputes. One of these is something called _trademark_ which at first
glance *seems* like a virtual-world connection because it often looks
just like a name, spelled in human-readable characters. But in fact, and
in law, it still has very distinct roots in physicality: geography, the
particular merchandise, etc. Thus numbers of As can have the same
trademark *name* -- whereas the Bs cannot.
Something like a land-rush has been going on over the past two or three
years, with everybody, including As and Bs, going for pretty, or clever,
or sexy, or important-sounding names as provided by the DNS. The As now
seem to be trying to define *all domain names as important, *all domain
names as trademarks, *all names as 'identities' -- despite, first of all,
the obvious fact that the mapping is one-to-many and therefore absurd
(unless something like Greg's idea of sharing names is worked out), and
second, the empirical fact that somebody else, such as a B, has
registered them first.
OK, so maybe some sort of law-n-order has to come to the virutal
frontier -- but being an A here has no 'standing' *except insofar as the
As say it has*.
So we have a choice: we can accept that the whole global shooting match
is commercial; that individuals have no rights even to their own names;
that every word in this message is liable to payment of royalties -- or
we can preserve the commons (for once!) and develop a Code of Virtual
Commerce which says, we're sorry you were operating under an illusion and
that you spent so much money to 'protect the identity of your real
business,' but ignorance of the *nondiscriminatory* nature of information
is no excuse. Keep your trademarks where they are *really relevant.
But if we do that, we're stuck with the uncomfortable implication that
the registrant of a domain name is the registrant of a domain name, As
and Bs right along with everyone else. Of these two alternatives, I think
I could get used to this second one a lot easier than the first.
----
Martin wrote, sarcastically:
{ The ability to
{ engineer the car, that has nothing to do with the value of the PORSCHE
{ name.
Again, the *historical, dirt (-road) based value of the name is one
thing. The *convenience of being able to type porsche in your web browser
and so on is something else. The first has been protected by trade law
*in order to promote trade*; the second belongs to the community of users
and is often called freedom of speech.
Portia, so Sue me
