Re: [wg-c] Kendall Dawson's thoughts, protection of famous names and marks

[Paul Garrin <pg@name-space.com>]

Dear Jonathan,

I agree with your points regarding reasonable "famous mark" protection.
As a new TLD registry and operator active since 1996, Name.Space, Inc.
has in place a famous names policy and has enforced it on many occasions,
all well documented and accepted willingly by the offenders without
protest.  This is not to say that any such policy will be perfect and
airtight, but it is a place to begin and when practiced in good faith
by registries/registrars it is possible to provide a reasonable balance
between free expression, fair use in commerce, and trademark protection.
Our experience and practice over the past four years indicates that this works.

Best regards,

Paul Garrin
Founder/CEO
Name.Space, Inc.
http://name-space.com

For general policy please see:
http://name-space.com/policy


> I too am a new member to the group and found Jon Weinberg's summary of
> extraordinarily utility.
> I wish to weigh in briefly on a few points:
> 
> 1) I would prefer that deployment take into account mechanisms for
> protection for famous marks/names. People can have different positions on
> the ideological issue of whether someone has a "right" to a name conferred
> by the domain name system or otherwise. But it may also be useful to weigh
> what kind of system is likely to create the least amount of wasted human
> energy, social, political, and legal stress. Why invite multijurisdictional
> fights over what may be alleged to be confusing, pirated, or willfully
> misleading? I believe it  would be better to have some means for
> differentiation and protection when world-familiar names, whether commercial
> or non-commercial, "Red Cross," "Red Crescent," "Amnesty International"
> marks or names are involved if it is possible. Thus strong continued support
> for Phillip Sheppard's balanced criteria of certainty, honesty,
> differentiation, competition, diversity, semantics, multiplicity, and
> finally very importantly, simplicity.
> 
> 2) I leave it to the technical experts to judge whether evaluation periods
> are needed to determine technical stability, but it seems fair to suggest
> that such periods, if not overly long, can be protective to the
> infrastructure as a whole.
>