Re: [wg-c] trademark law & new gTLDs

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 05:08:57PM -0400, Jonathan Weinberg wrote:
[...]
> 	What's the answer?  You got it — MORE gTLDs.

It might be the answer if humans were different.  But it is clear that more 
gTLDs, by themselves, do not solve the large TM holders problem.  They will 
still have to either register in every gTLD, or spend a lot of time 
policing all the new ones.

>  In meatspace, consumers cope
> just fine with the fact that there are a lot of businesses named Acme.
> They know about the various businesses; they don't expect any particular
> Acme to be the particular one they have in mind; and they don't get
> confused.  If consumers learned that there were a lot of different domains
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Big "if".  If they don't learn, TM holders are in deep weeds.

> on the web named www.acme.sometld, they wouldn't expect any particular one
> to belong to Warner Brothers (which has a variety of U.S. registrations for
> "acme") or to Jef Poskaner (who in fact owns the acme.com domain), or the
> Acme Glass Company, or anybody else.  The mere existence of the domain name
> would no longer be confusing.  Further, we can achieve this result without
> regard to whether the new TLDs we add are "chartered," as Kent suggests, or
> general-purpose.

Whether we achieve this result or not is completely problematic.  In order 
for your theory to hold we have to be able to predict consumer reaction to 
new gTLDs with a high degree of confidence.  If we were able to make such 
predictions with confidence things would be very different, in many ways.

I have a solution to the problem of world peace -- we just all have to be 
nice to each other.  Nothing to it. :-)

The point of chartered TLDs is orthogonal to this issue, BTW.

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain