Ron--
That's one of the problems: com, net, and org are *not* structured TLDs. NSI stopped
any effort to make them into that some time ago. I could register in any one of them
tomorrow if I wanted to spend $70. The more aggressive trademark holders have pushed
against this boundary too, and found no resistance (viz, British Telecom's "bt.org"
decision in the One in a Million case). The courts were ignorant and the TM owners
could get away with it, so they did. That's how IP law works--the boundaries of the
right are inherently indefinite and the line between inexcusable monopoly power and
protection against fraud and confusion is not always easy to discern.
This problem can be undone, perhaps, if the TM community and the Internet community
come to an agreement about noncommercial TLDs, and/or if proprietary or chartered
TLDs are established which actually enforce specific policies about who can register
in their domains.
It would be nice if WIPO were constructive enough to actually propose a way to go
about this, instead of merely stating the idea and rehashing the IAHC proposals of
two years ago, but that of course is probably expecting too much.
Ron Fitzherbert wrote:
> But we already have structured TLDs (org, net, com, ccTLDs) and they don't
> seem to matter -- the current dispute policy (and apparently the current
> feeling of the intellectual property owners in a lot of cases) is that the
> only part that matters is the domain name -- not the TLD it is in nor any
> hosts that are in the FQDN. How is adding more gTLDs going to change
> anything unless we "fix" what we already have?
>
> On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Martin B. Schwimmer wrote:
>
> > I hope the rest of you are listening. Sturctured TLDs (or rTLDs as some
> > have called them) provide context which can alleviate likelihood of
> > confusion. mycarisaporsche.com has a different connotation from
> > mycarisaporsche.per or .hobby or .fan.
> >
> >
> > At 06:40 PM 2/4/99 -0500, you wrote:
> > >Yes, of course, it all depends on commercial use and likelihood of confusion.
> > >It does not depend on the character string. My opinion, below, was based
> > on an
> > >assumption that it was OK for an innocent porsche enthusiast to use it. In a
> > >non-commercial TLD, for example, such as you have advocated.
> > >--MM
> > >
