Re: [wg-b] notification as compromise?

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Kathy is correct. There are existing, reasonably-priced services that provide the
same level of notification proposed by Schwimmer without the cost and regulatory
headaches of attempting to re-engineer DNS administration.

Also, commercial registries (if ICANN allows them to exist) have a direct
economic incentive to sell that service to trademark holders who are willing to
pay for it. I could say more about this but I am constrained by a NDA.

The availability of commercial monitoring and protection services is an extremely
important point. The trademark-domain name issue has never been about whether or
not trademarks will be protected. Never. It has always been about who will assume
the economic responsibility for protection. In institutional economics this is
called the "distribution of transaction costs." While the TM/IP interests had
some grounds for complaining that it was unfair to incur tens of thousands of
dollars in costs to combat garden-variety cybersquatting, once a UDRP with
"complete and accurate contact information" is in place the whole economic
equation changes in their favor dramatically. The TM/IP constituency could take a
huge step toward convincing the rest of the Internet community of their
reasonableness and willingness to compromise by abandoning famous marks
exlcusions entirely, contingent upon an acceptable UDRP. Failure to do this will
harden attitudes on UDRP and in other areas.

KathrynKL@aol.com wrote:

> Actually, Thompson & Thompson and others are running searches on the WHOIS
> database all the time.  Even if some of the contact information is ultimately
> held private, I believe that the registered domain names will always  be
> public.  T&T could notify Nissan of whatever strings Nissan wanted --
> including close spellings, other car names, etc.
>
> Couldn't the market rather than the registry provide the service?
>
> Harald@alvestrand.no wrote:
> > (If the domain name database is searchable for substrings, you don't even
> >  have to have the registry involved - "search every 3rd day" is a business
> >  opportunity - but that has privacy implications too - see discussion in
> >  WIPO report on open databases).
> >
>
> Kathy Kleiman



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m i l t o n   m u e l l e r // m u e l l e r @ s y r . e d u
syracuse university          http://istweb.syr.edu/~mueller/