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

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

I'm at a school of information studies where classification research is something that's been done for about 100 years. The "rationality" of a system of classification depends entirely upon its purpose. There is no scientific basis for classifying industries, unlike, say, biological taxonomies or the period table of elements (which also changes). No system of classification of anything as dynamic and time-bound as business activity can be used as the basis for unambiguous mapping between domain names and trademark claims. Single firms span multiple markets and categories; the relevant categories wax and wane in size.

To give you a flavor, the TM classifications have a special category for "rope," which was a big thing when the categories were invented, but no category for "computers." Virtually everything in the information economy falls under the "misc" category. Not helpful.

Mark Measday wrote:

> Hi, Rita,
>
> Is that a specific US problem for US trademark lawyers to resolve?  Or are you saying that trademark classes themselves are inherently not susceptible to rational analysis and cannot be distinctly mapped to TLDs (e.g. as in the Simon Higgs document Kent refers to)? Apologies if this is an obtuse question.
>