Re: [wg-c] WG-C Report

["Mark C. Langston" <skritch@home.com>]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2000 at 02:17:00PM -0500, Kevin J. Connolly wrote:
> "Mark C. Langston" <skritch@home.com> wrote (03/17/00 01:36PM)
> >On Fri, Mar 17, 2000 at 06:12:57PM +0100, Petter Rindforth wrote:
> >> 
> >
> >  > * The report mainly ignores the difficulties that trademark owners
> >  will face in attempting to protect their names, {snip now that context is clear}
> >
> >Doesn't the law require the TM owner to police their own marks, rather
> >than shift the burden of this to an entity like a registrar?  I believe
> >this discussion has gone round several times in WG-B, where it belongs.
> >
> 
> While Mr. Langston's statement is literally correct, we are not now
> facing a legal issue. We are facing a political issue, in which the
> trademark interests are ill-served by allowing the expense of
> policing their marks to be greatly increased.


[...snip rest, as this is really the point...]

The political reality, as I see it, is that the TM interests flat-out
will do everything in their considerable power to prevent ANY namespace
expansion whatsoever unless there is _a priori_ protection built into
the very mechanism of the DNS system itself.

The TM interests are already protected by treaty, by US and
international law, by contract in the form of the UDRP, and now they
also wish to have, in essence, all possible infringing strings
eliminated from the pool of potentially available SLDs, without even
going through a process to determine whether or not, on a case-by-case
basis, such infringement even exists.

In other words, the way I see it, up until now, in the offline world,
'infringement' has _always_ been bound up in contextual dependencies
of manner of use, location of use, market, and so on.  Now, the TM
interests are pushing as hard as they possibly can to not only
eliminate the cost of policing their marks, but to eiliminate any
possibility of infringement whatsoever, before the fact, on a
context-free basis.


Furthermore, the TM interests have demonstrated time and again that
they will oppose any effort whatsoever to expand namespace, but they
always couch this in terms such as, "we'll take it slow and see how it
goes."  See how what goes?  If we wait six months, will the policing
cost magically vanish?

Of course not.  It will alwyas be around.  Unless we supervene
international treaty and US law (and step far, far beyond the
boundaries of not only this group's charter, but ICANN's as well).


The reality is this: As long as domain names exist, there will be a
cost to policing them, whether in time, effort, money, or all of
these.  And that cost _will_ grow as the namespace grows.  And the TM
interests have apparently reached that price at which it is cheaper
for them to prevent namespace expansion than it is to police it.

That being the case, I can not only say that I have not seen
demonstrated the TM interests' willingness to compromise and work
together to foster the expansion of the namespace, I can say by your
own reasoning that there will never be such a demonstration, unless
the namespace somehow shrinks.

I'm imminently willing to cooperate with the TM interests in order to
reach a solution agreeable to all; however, I am not willing to
repeatedly surrender all ground we may have gained because the TM
interests stomp their feet and demand that things go their way and
only their way.  "Cooperation" implies the making of concessions by
all involved parties.  I had thought we'd reached such a point with
the acceptance of the 6-10 figure by the majority.  The recent
invasion of WG-C by the WG-B principals, and the apparent cessation of
all public work in WG-B, coupled with this renewed push back to where
we began demonstrates to me that the majority of the TM interests
represented here are unwilling to cooperate.

We are all Sisyphus, and I for one am getting very, very tired of
pushing this boulder.  


-- 
Mark C. Langston
mark@bitshift.org
Systems & Network Admin
San Jose, CA