Re: [wg-b] Re: Fw: Unfamous Names...

[Mark Measday <measday@josmarian.ch>]

Harald, whilst I admire you energy in throwing away the entirety of the
laboriously created agreements and harmonisations that lead to epochal events
like TRIPs and other international instruments for avoiding war, commercial
strife etc, and while I agree that jolly good fellows like yourself and the
mysterious Mr Berryhill should decide unilaterally what should happen as it nice
and simple and transparent, do you not perhaps think that the so-called
'trademark fraternity' and friends who had spent a couple of hundred years
laboriously building a roughly workable corpus of interntaional law might have
been a little upset when a few be-jeaned internet rocketeers trolled into the
conference room and told them it all had to change?

On the other hand, as most of the pitches I have seen from the trademark lawyers
over the past two years has been about getting business, very few have the
intellectual breadth of vision you and your fellows display, and I assume Michael
Froomkin is precluded by professional commitment from digesting his views in an
easy-to-understand format.

My naive (and I'm determined to remain so, I know nothing about any of this)
assumption is that (i) there will be new TLDs, ccTLDs and the like, (ii) large
multinationals don't want to register in lots of them. (iii) so people will steal
them (iv) so there will be lawsuits (Mr Berryhill is singlehandedly going to
initiate most of these) (v) sometimes registrars will get caught up in the
lawsuits (vi) registrars would like some surety against these risks (see
Josmarian's notes on risk managemnet in this area) and (vii) a famous names list
would help to provide this.

Not quite as sophisticated as the WIPO report, which assumes that lawyers
understand the reciprocal nature of famous name recognition and the history of
trademark law (which I don't), which explains why WIPO is central to this process
and why US-lawyers who think the Lanham Act dilution doctrine (?) is the end of
the argument need to go back to school.

Tell me where I'm wrong and I'll shut up.

MM



Harald Tveit Alvestrand a écrit :

> At 18:34 08.04.2000 +0200, Mark Measday wrote:
> >In conclusion, the more the merrier. I'd still like an account from Harald
> >as to what happened in the official WIPO process, though, which might
> >prevent any waste of time.
> My note is still on http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/wiponote.html
>
> The only relevant part of the process was the part of the last meeting in
> Geneva, which I unfortunately had to leave to catch a plane.
>
> It was quite clear to me after that meeting that:
>
> - Strong pressure had been brought to bear upon WIPO to enshrine famous marks
>    protection within its report
> - The WIPO people, like almost everyone else, didn't like the idea.
>
> Michael Froomkin is in a better position to tell you more.
>
>                Harald
>
> --
> Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
> Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no