Re: [wg-c] bounced message, reposted for ... and The limits of ...

[Eric Brunner <brunner@world.std.com>]

Several weeks ago I attempted to elicit Mr. Ambler's issues, and was unable
to progress beyond the expression of fear to which Kent has attempted to
allay. I was briefly curious how his initial suggestion that we "get behind
B and wait" transformed into "never", but some things are better left to
others, along with the predictable expressions by Mssrs Walsh and Meyer.

The first point, an informational one, with significant consequences, is
that in Canada, the US and so on, "Indian" in all of its variations, viz:
	Canada	Treaty, Metis, Inuit, etc.
	US	American Indian, Aleut, Eskimo, Hawai'ian, etc.
is a political classification, not an apolitical "ethnic" or "race" catagory.
This has a direct bearing on the nature of the claim available.

The second point is simply to confirm the statement of the NCAI text, the
registry sought is to be operated by and for, not for the exclusive use of.
If one wants to look at exclusive use registries, a point Milt managed not
to take when drafting an avoidable error in his B text, the NSN.US is the
cannonical example. As a corollary, songbird.com.naa is a given, as are our
other trading partners, such as IBM.

Is .NAA just a gTLD with a *more* restrictive set of Intellectual Property
criteria? This is the finest concise statement I've come across, but a few
nuances are present. First, "Indian Country" exists legally, throughout but
not uniformly, in the Americas. There are underlying legal jurisdictions,
about 588 in the US, and 608 in Canada, unlike the current NSI operated gTLDs
.COM/.ORG/.NET. Second, none of these governments are parties to the set of
treaties that form the international IP regime, instead they are parties to
the Mataatua Declaration and the Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous
People (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1995/26), and related Indigenous and UN HRC Drafts.
This difference is reflected in the contrast between Article 8 (j) of the
CBD and Article 27.3.(b) of the TRIPS Agreement.

The short form is, in the trademark domain, there is little substantive
difference between the colonial and indigenous IP systems, and the edge
cases are distillers, sports and sex clubs who manage to pirate marks in
what amounts to a grey market.

However, the answer must be no. There is not just the jurisdictional bits
of difference, and the theory of marks bits of difference, but the scope 
of policy. The Mexican State selected Linux for the Mexican K12 system.
That is policy. NSI no longer even requires proof of 501(c)(3) status for
a US registrant into the .ORG gTLD. That is non-policy. We have policy
goals distinct from NSI's, and distinct from replicating NSI's experience.

We originally proposed a set of seven (7) regional registries to Jon Postel,
knowing that the condition of "statelessness" was not unique to any group,
or any continent. In the context of 6-10, asking for 7 seemed ingracious,
and we intend, like RIPE and ARIN do for the African and South American
Address Registries, to be trustees of or hosts for Indigenous Peoples until
the regional model or some other alternative to the colonial states model
is available.

Cheers,
Eric

P.S. Funny how the response to mail on risk and reason runs to race.