[wg-b] Not Speech?

["John Berryhill Ph.D. J.D." <john@johnberryhill.com>]

As Mr. Hartman has pointed out, domain names are not speech, but the content
of the website is.

In order to stay focused on the law, it would be instructive to take a look
at it from time to time, such as the recent decision in:

Jeri-Jo Knitwear, Inc. v. Club Italia, Inc., 98 CV 4270 (RO), UNITED
STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK, 2000 U.S.
Dist. LEXIS 4891 , April 17, 2000, Decided, April 18, 2000, Filed

Now, the defendant had rights of their own to use the TM outside of the
U.S., including use in Italy.

The defendants also had a website addresses in the .it top-level domain.

The court, in its wisdom, determined that they could keep their .it domain
name, but they couldn't put hyperlinks from any pages addressed in .com or
.net to the page at the .it name.  The reason?  The court determined that
.com and .net are more familiar to U.S. users than .it.  Therefore it was
okay if the defendant used their Italian trademark in the .it domain, as
long as they stay out of .com or .net.

This is where we are going folks.  Never mind that such a hyperlink would
have nothing to do with use of the name.  Never mind that the entire .it
website can simply be framed into a .com site.

Welcome to the brave new world where the only domain names that make sense
are the ones that are NOT descriptive and generic of the data located at
that address (since they can't be registered as trademarks).