At 08:01 AM 2/2/99 , Milton Mueller wrote:
>
>Dave Crocker wrote:
>
>> NSI is the problem, in this case, not the trademark community, because NSI
>> is choosing to give the extra rights to trademark holders.
>
>Huh?
>So Gabe Battista just woke up one day and said, "by golly, I LIKE trademarks!
>Think I'll give them bigger and stronger rights!"
No, Mark Radcliffe, actually. Mr. Radcliffe, author of the July 1995
policy, was quoted as saying he designed the policy to give "special
relief" to trademark owners.
>No, as a veteran despiser of the NSI drp, I can say that it was purely a
>defensive tack on their part, albeit a boneheaded and unfair one. Lawsuits
from
>trademark holders pushed them into it.
It seems likely that the NSI policy was a hasty and ill-conceived response
to the legal bills in the Knowledgenet case, in which NSI's Washington
counsel spent over a hundred thousand dollars fighting personal
jurisdiction in Illinois which is where Knowledgenet sued it. The question
was, how to keep from spending a hundred thousand dollars each time some
trademark owner has a gripe, and the (incorrect) answer was, let's make a
policy of always siding with the trademark owner.
The correct answer would have been simply to interplead the domain name
each time a trademark owner sued, and otherwise to get out of the line of
fire. And to stop fighting personal jurisdiction battles given the fact
that NSI does business everywhere and has customers everywhere.
And indeed since the Knowledgenet case, NSI has stopped fighting personal
jurisdiction battles. When sued by domain name owners in Colorado, Texas,
California, and other states, it has simply proceeded in those forums
rather than incur another hundred-thousand-dollar legal bill fighting
jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, NSI seems to lack the spine to respond to trademark owners
by saying "get a court order and we will comply, but don't ask us to give
you extrajudicial preliminary injunctive relief". Instead, it gives
extrajudicial preliminary injunctive relief hundreds of times per year.
