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

["Keith Gymer" <keith.gymer@btinternet.com>]

From: Mark Measday <measday@ibm.net> wrote

>I restate the naive original question, which would presumably be
>answered by a large number of similar informed responses, should this be
>the case..... Whilst no taxonomy can be perfect, the question remains
>whether the imperfections in the reconciliation of the  international
>classes to various national laws are sufficient to prevent mapping of
>the international classes to classes of TLDs in practice, à la Higgs.

In my view, as a trade mark attorney, and having looked at this in some
detail, such a mapping would be inadequate and inappropriate.  If we were
creating a trademark classification system now, we would surely not start
from the very limited 42 Nice classes.

The more appropriate model for a business taxonomy (and before MM and co
jump up and down I am not proposing that a future TLD taxonomy should be
exclusively for business), would seem to be provided by Yellow Pages.
Consumers and businesses are used to finding the business they are looking
for using such a taxonomy, and a YP taxonomy can take account of national
and cultural variations if ccTLDs haven't mortgaged their SLDs already (eg.
lloyds.bank.uk) etc.  (The problem of existing ccTLDs which have allowed
open registration at SLD level, might perhaps be addressed by issuing new
ISO-3166 3-letter TLDs to each country subject to the restriction that they
are for national YP category use only).

Obviously, as there are presently several thousand YP sub-categories, some
selectivity would be desirable to get the process started, but considering
how Usenet groups are categorised and sub-categorised, I don't believe that
this represents an insurmountable problem.  The main difficulty I foresee
would be agreeing suitable TLD abbreviations for the categories.

Keith