At 02:47 PM 3/29/99 -0500, you wrote:
>>Jumping into both of these, I understand that I
>>don't own .com, but only cerebalaw.com.
>
>
>Hi Bill,
>
>You admit to owning cerebalaw.com?
Oh, yes indeed. In a trademark registration I would have
to disclaim the .com part, but "cerebalaw" belongs to me,
and it has nothing to do with the net.
>
>I wouldn't even go that far.
>
>I'd say that you have certain exclusive
>property rights in cerebalaw.com, and
>certain shared property rights in .com.
I have a license to have that . . . what's their name again? . . .
NSI entity list cerebalaw.com in a registry somewhere so
my IP can be found.
And now an interesting question: registries and domain
names aside, do I own that IP? Those friggin' NUMBERS?
That one little segment of the whole WORLD WIDE WEB?
I don't think so. So from WHERE did Iperdome get the range
of IP numbers that it is so happily populating with .per
thingees? Didn't somebody allocate those? Doesn't that
somebody have the ultimate sayso about those numbers?
If they weren't paid, would they take them back? If I failed
to pay my rent, would I lose my IP and my space? Yes.
Would I lose cerebalaw? Not on your tintype. Any
registrary entity that tried to give it to anyone else
would rue the day. Why? Because that's MY trademark.
If it ever happened, I wouldn't write any letter to any
registrar such as you know who; I'd sue the bastards.
>
>Now, if you ever decided to delegate
>fenello.cerebalaw.com to me, then I would
>have certain exclusive property rights in
>fenello.cerebalaw.com, and certain shared
>property rights in cerebalaw.com (just like
>.com has certain exclusive property rights
>in .com, and certain shared property rights
>in the ROOT).
Rights of use, not ownership. Cerebalaw
itself I own. (I started to write something about
easements, and stopped myself just in time.
Been there, done that, it don't work.)
>
>
>>What
>>I'm saying is that no one else owns .com either,
>>not only because it's a product of the USG but
>>also because it's simply a mnemonic for a set
>>of numbers defining an agreed upon domain space.
>>No one owns "888" or "800" either; those are routes
>>in the same way that .com is, and as it happens,
>>the FCC just released a whole bunch more of them
>>saying, "If you want one that's not already taken,
>>go to AT&T, or Sprint, or whoever, and if no one
>>has beat you to it, you can get it."
>
>
>I'd say that it is the "registries" role
>to brand and market a TLD.
Not in our lifetimes.
>
>For example, .per could represent PERSONAL,
>PERFECT, PERSNICKITY, etc. Iperdome, however,
>has branded .per(sm) as a service offering
>Personal Domain Name services under the
>.per TLD.
Does it show up anywhere else than as a TLD -- um,
as a code for routing packets parts over the web?
Don't think you'd get a registration, but you might
try. You'll be told that it's only like a phone number,
and not an indication of a source of goods and
services. Why is cerebalaw any different? Because
it has a nice big fat logo (i.e. not just a domain
name) and is used in other places: all of my court
filings show the firm name as Cerebalaw, the Oregon
State Bar lists me as William S. Lovell, Cerebalaw,
. . . yadda yadda. You gotta USE THE NAME AS
AN INDICATOR OF THE SOURCE FOR THE
PARTICULAR GOODS OR SERVICES, and not
just in the manner of a phone number or street
address. (Granted, certain quite famous street
addresses have, over time, come to be associated
with particular goods and hence can be accorded
trademark recognition, but it's not the address
itself that accomplished that, but advertising.)
(The wished for hypothetical: "Man, that guy was a
real kick butt lawyer; creams the other side every
time. Don't know his name, but his firm name was
. . . uh . . . cerb something . . . oh, yes, cerebalaw.
Catchy name, that. Suggests something like
intellectual property, doesn't it? I'll bet it's on the net!
GOTCHA!)
Wanna see my gorgeous logo?
http://cerebalaw.com
(You'll get to listen to Pachelbel's Canon in D at
the same time if you're not MIDI challenged.)
There's a lawyer type guy who tried to register
"www.hisname.com" and got blown away both
by the Trademark Office and on appeal. Why?
Tucked away in the lower right corner of his
letterhead, which he used atop his home page,
was "www.hisname.com" along with his other
means of communication, i.e., his phone no.,
FAX no., etc. The big thing on the page was
his name -- you've all seen letterheads like that.
(These dumb lawyers -- can't teach them a thing!)
Now compare my page. Cerebalaw is the
SOURCE of all that great legal stuff I blather
about and . . . oh, by the way, . . . I also
happen to use cerebalaw.com as my domain
name. But it's not that domain name that gives
me trademark rights. My domain name, as such,
was no different in principle from that of dumb butt
lawyer.
If you run a business in which ".per" gets to
be known as a SOURCE of goods and services
by other means, and is something more than just
a SLD, TLD 3LD, or whatever, THEN you'll have
trademark rights.
>
>>Should be
>>the same with domain names: there's a new
>>TLD defined by international agreement; you
>>rush to your nearest Registrar or to your ISP
>>and thence to some one of the "favored five"
>>and if you beat out Joe Blow down the street,
>>you get it.
>>
>>In short, the letter code that defines some subset
>>of the nearly infinite domain name space, whether
>>that letter code be "per" or anything else, should be
>>set by international agreement and freely available
>>to every prospective domain name holder to use,
>>through whatever registrar that prospective registrant
>>may choose.
>
>And where does this public ownership of the
>name space begin, and where does it end.
It begins somewhere in a Galaxy far, far away,
and it NEVER ends.
>
>Why are you singling out the SLD as the
>component *you* can own, but TLDs are
>part of the public trust.
Because, as noted above, I don't own any
of the space which cerebalaw.com occupies,
but am only renting it. The space itself is still
in the public trust. An SLD is by definition a
part of a TLD, and I've already said that the
TLD is in public trust; ergo . . . .
>
>What about those name spaces that will only
>let people register in the 3LDs. Do they
>have ZERO, ZIP, ZILCH, NADA rights to their
>name because the SLD "owns" it all?
No, nobody owns any of it except the public --
by which is meant the international public.
>
>Frankly, this is what all the fighting is
>about. ICANN, like the gTLD-MoU before it,
>wants to own all levels of the name space,
>INCLUDING cerebalaw.com!
Well, we'll see about that, now won't we? :-)
Certain nations can control certain air spaces, or
certain limited reaches of the sea within limits
that are specified by international treaty, but
no country owns even one atom of the air or
the sea -- they belong to humanity, as does
every speck of domain name space, from time
immemorial until the Big Bang bounces back.
Bill Lovell
