Fwd: Re: [gtld-council] Regarding non-commercial interests in the gTLD market

[Mawaki Chango]

In connection with the question as to what the situation is in
other legal systems regarding trademark vs. domain name as in
the US court cases cited by Robin in her earlier posting: please
find below a related email I sent to the council list. Chuck,
from RyC, says he rather agree with our amendment to Recom.3,
but would prefer to drop altogether the reference to trademark
rights as well as to the freedom of expression rights.

Anyway, about other legal systems, I'm not lawyer and don't have
the linguistic apparatus to expose this in sound technical
terms, but following the news and discussing with people, I've
come to think that the underlying rationale in those cases
corresponds well to what is known in the French legal system
(and maybe in some others, too) as "class" of trademark.
Trademark rights are not universal, all categories confused.
Calling a style of furniture "Porto" or Bordeaux/Bordelais" is
not an infringement to well-known drink trademarks as if when
one attempts to call those same names (or very close & confusing
variants) some liquors different from those well-known. The
trademark rights pertain to specific, limited, and relevant
domains (classes), leaving the trademark name available for
other purposes in other domains. And until further notice
otherwise, the Internet domain name is not a trademark name.

Mawaki

Note: forwarded message attached.
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From: Mawaki Chango <ki_chango at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [gtld-council] Regarding non-commercial interests in the gTLD market
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 12:32:09 -0700 (PDT)
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