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

[Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law]

The difficulty with this idea is that the UDRP is supposed to mirror
national law.  We don't give guidance to panelists because they are
supposed to follow law that comes from ELSEWHERE, not ICANN.

In fact, however, US law already has a few cases where judges have
suggested that .com is more likely to be confusing than other TLDs, so
this distinction is a real one, at least for US law based cases.
(However, it would be an exaggeration to say that the distinction is
a firm one, widely accepted - it's at a just-past-nascent stage at
present).


On Sat, 23 Mar 2002, vint cerf wrote:

> 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
> 
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