[ncdnhc-discuss] Board Positions on .ORG; Answers from V.Cerf -- full text

[vint cerf]

that's in interesting proposal. The trademark world tends to view any 
potential dilution or weakening of a mark to be risky so I don't know
whether a formulation such as you suggest would work but it is an
interesting idea. Of course, one might experience abuse of such an
arrangement if someone registered coca-cola.org or kodak.org and
used the site in a way that really did cause confusion as to the
operator of the site, association or not with the known trademark, etc.
So one would also need a way to deal with that, I guess.

Have you tried this idea out on the business constituency of DNSO?

vint

onAt 08:46 AM 3/23/2002 -0500, James Love wrote:
>I would like to offer a different way to frame the issue than one of
>regulating what someone does on a .org site.  By addressing the issue of
>what trademark claims one can make, there will be a self selection on .org.
>One can allow completely open registration on .org (the NC and ICANN board
>recommendation and certainly what every registrar wants),  and not permit
>any challenges to the use of a domain for any reason.   At the same time,
>one can provide some guidance to the UDRP panels as to what constitutes
>confusion under the existing UDRP guidelines.  In particular, one make it
>clear that a non-commercial use on .org is not considered confusion with a
>business use that may have a trademark involving the same domain name
>string.     This would make the NC suggestion of "marketing" .org for
>non-commercial use have some content and structure, and it would have the
>costs of this policy borne by those who seek to take .org domains away.
>
>If one has strong ideological reasons to oppose any differentiation of uses
>of TLDs, then this will not be well received, and there may be some other
>pragmatic or strategic concerns here, that have not been explained.    But I
>have offered this to address concerns that the NC recommendation for .org is
>too vague in some areas, and to address our own concersn about NGO's being
>knocked off .org domains by businesses who have similiar trademarks (as has
>already happened in .net).
>
>   Jamie