Re[2]: [wg-b] www.bye-bye-aol.com

[peter.weiss@chanelusa.com]

Everything in life is a tradeoff. Does that mean we're going to leave everything to litigation?

It shouldn't be that difficult for an intelligent Registrar - and most of them are - to distinguish between a put-down name like bye-bye-aol or aolsucks or aolstinks and a confusing name like aol.org or aol.net., not to mention aol.com. Confusion and unfair diversion are at the heart of this problem. Nobody is going to think bye-bye-aol is a real aol site. Peter Weiss


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: [wg-b] www.bye-bye-aol.com
Author:  mueller@syr.edu at INTERNET
Date:    11/29/99 3:52 PM


A lot of people seem to think that clever algorithms or policies will allow us to avoid these problems, literally to "engineer" them out of existence.

I would respectfully suggest that we can _never_ avoid making trade-offs between political values as fundamental as free speech and intellectual property by the crude mechanism of domain name assignment policy. There will be
no "bullet proof" policies. There will always be a need for litigation, and the
fundamental trade-offs will always be resolved through litigation.

I think it is dangerous for us to proceed under any other assumption. --MM

Jeff Shrewsbury Info Avenue wrote:

> A classic example of how a political or commercial statement can be
> interwoven into a domain name alongside a famous trademark. The domain name > world is in for many, many more of these -- good and bad. Unless we can
> forge a bullet-proof policy that protects free speech AND at the same time > curtails abusive behavior, we're going to have years and years of
> litigation and stress over these issues. >
> I wonder what AOL's team of lawyers say about this. >
> Jeff Shrewsbury
> Info Avenue