RE: [wg-b] Recent US Case Law

[Meyers@sglm.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael D. Palage [mailto:mpalage@infonetworks.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 11, 1999 11:15 AM
To: wg-b@dnso.org
Subject: [wg-b] Recent US Case Law


The following article written by Dan Goodin, a staff writer for CNET
News.com, discussed the recent opinions written in the "clue.com",
"Avery.net", and "Dennison.net" disputes. I found the following excerpt from
the clue.com opinion rather interesting.

"While use of a trademark as a domain name to extort money from the
markholder or to prevent that markholder from using the
domain name may be per se dilution, a legitimate competing use of the domain
name is not," Woodlock wrote. "Holders of a famous mark are not
automatically entitled to use that mark as their domain name; trademark law
does not support such a monopoly."

Link to Dan Goodin's full article:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-202-113813.html
or
http://news.cnet.com/category/0-1005-200-113813.html

I know these decisions will do little to sway the strongly held opinions of
most of the participants on this list.  However, I do believe it reinforces
the importance of our task: drafting  a policy/procedure that will safeguard
the collective interests of individuals, small business, and large
international corporations that are domain name holders.

Although I have been encouraged by the increased participation in the list
since the Santiago, Chile that has flushed out some additional important
issues, we as a group must begin to focus our collective efforts. I am in
the process of working with the DNSO webmaster to implement a votebot to
allow us to vote on the various issues confronting us.   In light of some of
the criticism of Working Group A's efforts, all participants will be able to
vote on all issues. I believe the availability of the VoteBot for use by
Jonathan and Amadeu in Working Group A would have made their task much
easier. However, faced with the circumstances surrounding them, I believe
they did an excellent job and Jonathan's experience has helped make this
Working Group run a lot more smoothly.

In an effort to ensure that this list continues to run smoothly, I encourage
all participants during the voting process to keep their comments brief and
on-point and strongly recommend against multi-threaded messages. I have seen
that some participants in the ICANN process always feel the need to get the
last word/post in.  As co-chair I have bent over backwards to compose a
group representative of the broad cross section of the Internet community.
One of the reasons that I have delayed the substantive voting process is
that I am still trying to get participation from all of the DNSO
constituency groups, specifically gTLDs, ccTLDs, ISPs, and small businesses.

The votebot has a report feature that allows the results to be posted for
all participants to view. It is my intention to post the results of each
vote to the list for all to audit - unless there is a strong consensus
otherwise.

Thanks for everyone's efforts to date and I look forward to everyone
continued participation.

Best regards,

Michael D. Palage
Co-Chair Working Group B








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