>At 01:21 PM 2/27/99 -0800, you wrote:
>>At 11:57 AM 2/27/99 -0800, Bill Lovell wrote:
>>>At 03:00 AM 2/27/99 -0800, you wrote:
Bill and all other EudorsPro users, under /Tools/Options/Miscellaneous, check the "Automatically Expand Nicknames" box and your reply should start to work correctly.
>>Okay, so the dent goes the *other* way. I always thought that, as the
>>holder of a registered trademark, I "owned" that mark. In what way do I not
>>own it?
>>
>Anything that can be "owned" is property. A trademark registration is more
>The trademark imposes duties of performance that neither patents nor copyrights
>impose, and are only acquired (this is all U. S. law, of course) by ACTUAL USE
>of the mark in commerce; the trademark registration itself neither adds to nor
>detracts from whatever trademark "rights" might already exist under the common
>law, except in terms of evidence. Those duties also include that of
>maintaining
>the quality of the goods sold under the mark: the consumer has a right to get
>what was expected when the purchase was made on the basis of the mark.
Thank you Bill! As ownership isn't near as important as control, I can live with your answer quite well. In this specific instance example, I create .GOSHALMIGHTY, register the trademark, create a charter for it, and support it on my name servers, and start taking registrations, then not ICANN, nor anyone else, can legally do a damn thing with that TLD? Mayhap, ICANN, once they start creating new gTLDs, would have no choice but to honor that TLD and enter it into the roots? A real strong argument can be made for that case.
I would posit that we have just found the natural process by which new TLDs will have to be created. Further, as Marty, Bill, and I discussed earlier on this list, all SLDs and other domains, registered within this TLD, can be protected behind the TLD's charter. It gets even more interesting in that, since the trademark-holder is held responsible for maintaining the quality of that mark, they can NOT be coerced into allowing other registrars to register domains in that TLD, on the simple argument of "quality control".
This shoots down a *whole bunch* of arguments made on these issues, over the past few years. Admittedly, some of them mine. It also blows huge chunks out of the ICANN domain name accreditation guide-lines. With these conclusions, they are moot. If they are considering adding fees to DNS registrations they should reconsider, as that avenue of revenue now becomes unworkable. Since trademarks are NOT property, unless they also copyrighted component (The text of a charter *may* qualify as such a copyrightable work), any discussions wrt property-rights are irrelevant.
Under these conditions I also submit the following:
- No one has control of SLD's, in this type of TLD, other than the TLD registry. Not ICANN, not anyone else. The trademark holder has sole responsibility for policing the mark. In fact, they may lose their mark unless they perform "due diligence".
- Mandatory Arbitration of SLD registrations can not be enforced on a chartered and marked TLD registry.
- Denial of access to the root-servers, when other TLDs are being registered, is questionable at best. It may not survive judicial review.
Over-all, I like it, who needs ICANN?
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