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

[Jefsey Morfin]

As BC and IPC Member (for that a non profit I chair is denied Membership to 
the NCDNHC) I would have some comments.

1. I certainly support that proposition. A suffix is a community name. The 
barbaric word "TLD" has no real meaning except in Mokapetris imagination. 
We are in a real world. The common understanding has transformed the "com" 
Tymnet customers into "commercial", the "net" Telenet subscribers in 
network oriented users and the "org" general organisation group into "non 
profit". This is an Internet Participant consensus. Businesses and IP 
owners have participated into that as everyine else. There is no more no 
less ground for this kind of common understanding that for the non legally 
defined "good faith" in an UDRP.

2. the BC is a list of Telcos, Registrars, even a TLD Manager, business 
organizations and of some SMEs. The IPC is a group of IP consultants. 
Usually this does not help in getting a clear signal from the worldwide 
Business and IP owners community. But here the call is for potential 
opposition. I doubt that any serious and clear move towards the reduction 
of the need of multiple registrations of the same name would not be 
seriously considred. I think it could be usefull jurisprudence.

3. You talk about TM dillution. This is true. But there would be far less 
dillution in having a separate possibility in the .org contract, than the 
joint risk of having the WLS+UDRP clauses in the *same* contract. No one 
but me opposed to what I see as a potentially catastrophic dillution: I 
suppose that TMs are far more resillient to dillution than we commonly 
expect as TL owners.

4. You talk about http://cocacola.org as the site of a CocaCola addicts 
Club, selling Pepsi. I suppose this could fall under a clause in the UDRP 
which could be of high interest. That you can question with drastic 
restrictions the use of a TM registered as a DN in other communities 
(TLDs).  The rationale - and I will be hated for that by many - is a 
conflict of communities (people). A TLD Manager and a Dmain owners are 
trustees of their communities (of DN holders for the TLD Manager, of 
sub-domain holders for a DN Manager. The DNS is recursive here too). 
Nothing has been though about the conflicts between these communities. The 
interest is that it would permit not to register TMs in every TLD while 
keeping the TM protected.

I wouild be interested in Jonathan Cohen's comments.
Jefsey









At 21:55 23/03/02, 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
>
>_______________________________________________
>Discuss mailing list
>Discuss at icann-ncc.org
>http://www.icann-ncc.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss