At 02:16 AM 3/31/99 -0800, Bill Lovell wrote:
>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?
There are whole blocks of IP space that are free for anyone to use at no
charge.
>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.
Uh Bill, I have customers, using NAT, that have all their workstations on
DHCP assigned class-A space, that is NOT part of the Internet. I have other
customers that are in FTN space, and I have UUCP systems as well. None of
them pay ARIN for space. Of course I assign them IP out of my net-block for
the gating functions.
>>I'd say that it is the "registries" role
>>to brand and market a TLD.
>
>Not in our lifetimes.
One entity, "Network Solutions". Your lifetime is mighty short.
>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.)
>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.
Now *these are points to be noted (and I *am* taking notes, good stuff
Maynard.). To digest and clarify, were I to use MHSC as the TLD (and "MHSC"
is clearly Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc's trademark, check the
home-page) then no-one could stop me and the procedure I described earlier
would hold.
___________________________________________________
Roeland M.J. Meyer -
e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Internet phone: hawk.lvrmr.mhsc.com
Personal web pages: http://staff.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site: http://www.mhsc.com
___________________________________________________
KISS ... gotta love it!
