On Wed, Apr 14, 1999 at 06:35:54PM -0700, Bill Lovell wrote:
> (2) The inescapable fact remains that even since Paul Revere put
> his mark on his silver, U. S. trademark law has followed a pretty
> straight path, arriving now at the Lanham Act. The common law
> as to what are or are not legal rights has followed a similar course.
> All of these proposals act as though the groups advocating this or
> that are writing on a clean slate: the slate is not clean; the law of
> trademarks is established, and no group of netizens or WIPO or
> "arbitrators" or "ombudsmen" or whatever have the authority to
> change even one comma thereof without going through the U. S.
> Congress, etc., etc. The internet is not the Wild West, however
> much it may be romanticized as the "New Frontier" or whatever.
I don't believe that anyone has claimed to change anything about US
TM law.
Question 1:
Given that I control the songbird.com domain, I am able to register
subdomains in that domain. It's dimly conceivable that through
heroic marketing, registrations in songbird.com could become wildly
popular, and I could charge for the service. For example, you could
pay your $35 or whatever to me, and register lovell.songbird.com.
Of course, I would require you to sign a registration agreement, a
*private contract* between you and Songbird.
Suppose in that registration agreement I put a clause that says that
if it turns out that the name you register is not a trademark of
yours, but is an identical string match with some trademark of some
other party, then you must give up your registration to that other
trademark holder, if that trademark holder wishes to be registered in
the songbird.com domain...
How would that contract break or contradict trademark law? How
would it "change one comma thereof"?
Question 2: Suppose instead of the above mentioned provision, I
specified in the registration agreement that you must follow the
guidelines set up by WIPO, and submit to binding arbitration if the
need arose. How would this new registration agreement break TM law?
What provisions of the Lanham act are contradicted?
Question 3: Presuming that this *private contract* between you and me
does not contradict trademark law, how is it that applying the WIPO
provisions to a registration agreement for .com would change anything
about the Lanham act? What, precisely, are the provisions of the
Lanham act that apply?
--
Kent Crispin "Do good, and you'll be
[EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome." -- Mark Twain
