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

[Mark Measday <measday@ibm.net>]

Keith,

Sounds incredibly sensible, although one regrets reducing the sensitive arcana
of your profession to the crudities of YP. I doubt US, UK and Spanish YPs would
maintain the same categorizations, for example, to introduce one of the
international complications.

Shouldn't businesses pay for a facility of such ease-of-use, where DNS/tm
issues are reconciled and there is reduced risk of legal liability for the
various infringements?

Who would sponsor the production of the appropriate taxonomy, WIPO? Surely
something exists somewhere, already?

Would there be any need for reconciliation with existing national and
reciprocal tm arrangements for the mapping of global DNS to international tm
taxonomies?

MM

Keith Gymer wrote:

> 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