Re: [ICANN-EU] Re: WIPO

[jeanette@medea.wz-berlin.de]

Hi,

> > A trademark is registered to clearly and unmistakably 
> > identify the producer of certain goods or provider of certain
> > services. A trademark can be registered for one or more 
> > categories, called classes of products and services.
> > BTW, that can include services like publishing including 
> > on the www or services including electronic mail, etc. 

Trademarks by definition refer to territories. Applied to cyberspace, 
they may also generate conflicts among themselves. 
 


> > Just put yourselve into the shoes of the trademark owner of
> > Mercedes for a while. Maybe you own some shares? :-)
> > You invested decades of work and tons of money to
> > establish the trademark. You took care to built an image and 
> > a reputation for whatever under this trademark. You made extra
> > investments to insure quality and consumer satisfaction. 
> > People now trust in the consistent quality of product offered and 
> > services randered under your trademark.
> > 
> > Now somebody else takes advantage of your trademark,
> > your reputation or prestige by publishing something on the 
> > internet or offering electronic services under your trademark. 
> > Maybe the person even attempts to damage the image of it.
> > How would you personally react?


All this makes sense for a minority of domain name holders only: 
multinational corporations. Should the whole DNS adjust to their 
concerns?

> I would sue them if I had the money Mercedes Benz has :-)

This is exactly the problem: the imbalance of ressources allocated 
to varying rights to names.
 


> > Lastly, to make this information more complete, 
> > most trademark laws prohibit the registration 
> > of what is defined as a common word like house,
> > bus, business, etc. 
> 
> Good and let that for once be as widely interpreted as WIPO interprets
> trademark rights. 

I know of several German cases, where generic terms have been 
subjected to intellectual property claims: "Freundin", the journal, is 
one, the broadcast program "Die Sendung mit der Maus" is 
another. 

> > Court cases are f.e. "mitwohnzentrale.de". 
> > The court argument is, that you cannot register 
> > mitwohnzentrale as a trademark for it is a common 
> > word and it cannot be blocked for others to use.

As far as I remember, the court ruled that domain names shouldn't 
contain descriptive terms.  


 > >Which gets us to: to start solving a number of the problems
> > >of DNS we have to get WIPO out of ICANN.

I think the idea of matching trademarks & real/ famous names to 
domain names is a dead end in the long run. Flat name spaces 
like .com or .de are by far not complex enough to adequately 
reflect the millions of Millers, Meiers and Smiths who in principle 
have a justifiable claim to equivalent domain names.  
Conflicts about trademarks are just the tip of the iceberg.  
What we need is a directory system complex enough to be able to 
mirror real names, brandnames, trademarks and whatever we may 
come up with tomorrow. The DNS is simply not up to this function - 
and it was never meant to. 
Sometime, perhaps even soon, somebody will introduce
such a directory system - white and yellow pages for the Net, that is.
 According to Schueller, German Telekom and other telcos are
already working on this.  Will this be a proprietory service or
a public recource? 
In any case, I think the battle over the DNS will vanish, sooner or 
later. 

jeanette