Re: [ICANN-EU] Re: WIPO

["Andreas Fügner" <Andreas.Fuegner@lizenz.com>]

Dear Jeanette:


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


Yes they do sometimes. That's why finding the apropriate
court is difficult. IMHO, all trademark cases in cyberspace
are worldwide cases. Or at least cases within one language 
group all over the world, f.e. all french speaking countries.

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


More the other way around. Only trademarks famous all over cyberspace
are protected. That means, only trademarks known by at least 50% 
of the cyber population should be protected. Say good by to TATA.

> 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