Re: [wg-b] Response to Milton M.

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@alvestrand.no>]

At 09:48 03.09.99 -0400, Milton Mueller wrote:


>Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>
> > According to Phil Sbarbro, NSI's lawyer, major cybersquatters now routinely
> > register thousands of names at a time
>
>You need to clarify your definitions here. People sometimes use the term
>"cybersquatter" to refer to domain name brokerages that "squat" on hundreds of
>common names, such as <gambling.com> in hopes of reselling them. The term 
>is ALSO
>used to refer to registrants who squat on trademarked names. When Phil 
>Sbarboro
>refers to the automatic registration of thousands of names, he is 
>referring to the
>former--name brokerages going after common names--not the latter. I've 
>discussed
>this with him.
>
>Name brokerages are not in the business of registering trademarks. They know
>that's a losing proposition. See, e.g., http://www.igoldrush.com/faq6.htm

OK, foot-in-mouth disease loose as usual.
OTOH, it's hard to see how the major-registration-of-stuff people could
AVOID hitting a trademark or two "by accident". And if the rules happen to
not favour that kind of business, I won't be sad at all.

> > At the WIPO experts' meeting, registrations containing "nissan" as a
> > substring were listed; about 400 of them. Of the 30 (I think?) new ones
> > registered during the month of January 1998, for which registration details
> > were listed, about 10 seemed to belong to companies in the name business,
> > not the car business. (The other 2/3 were either probable Nissan car
> > dealerships or unidentifiable)
>
>I think both of us would agree that no exclusion policy can possibly 
>prevent the registration of substrings. We in this working group can 
>*only* be concerned with issues posed by the registration of 
><nissan.tld>  Anything more pre-empts free speech and may even violate 
>legitimate trademark or other rights of domain name registrants.
>
>Whether such substring registrations should be actionable under a DRP is 
>another question, but not one that we happen to be working on. It is 
>important to stay focused.

Good - if we agree that substrings are out of scope, we've significantly 
reduced the amount of damage famous marks can do. And DRP is "someone 
else's problem".
Next question: do we also want to rule out of scope the question of whether 
nisan, niisan and nisssan should be reserved/blocked/actionable if "nissan" 
is found to be a famous mark?

                                 Harald

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@maxware.no