Mueller refers to my blatnat irrationality and talks about how greedy pizza
hut would be if someone obtained pizza-hut.co.na and concludes:
> It certainly bears no
>relationship to trademark law.
You know, reasonable folks can differ on these issues, but after a certain
point all that's left for me to say is that you are a professor of
communications and have been dabbling in the trademark debate for a little
while (dishonestly in my personal opinion), and I am an international
trademark attorney and have handled trademark matters in probably over a
hundred different countries. You want to spout about markets, fine, but
when it comes to trademark law, you simply don't know what you are talking
about.
>
>--MM
>
>Martin B. Schwimmer wrote:
>
>> >>Also, in response to Martin Schwimmer:
>> >>
>> >>>In other words, if you added .inc, .ltd., .firm, .shop and .store
>> >>>tomorrow, then anonymous folks could tomorrow register ebay.inc,
>> >>>ebay.ltd, ebay.firm, ebay.shop and ebay.store, all of which, in my
>> >>>humble but professional opinion, are likely to create confusion with
>> >>>our friends over at ebay.com.
>> >>
>> >>This seems to be a reasonable concern, given that there is already
>> >>quite a bit of registration of companies in ccTLDs. Wouldn't the
>> >>companies who are interested in having those names in all (or even
>> >>most) TLDs pursue the same avenues they are pursuing in the existing
>> >>gTLDs?
>> >>
>> >>--gregbo
>> >
>> If I understand your question correctly:
>>
>> TM owners are utilizing services like netnames or namestake to obtain as
>> many ccTLD versions of their TMs as they can reasonably afford, although it
>> adds up - especially since a company may need to acquire several names in a
>> particular ccTLD (because of reserved second level DNs (i.e. .co.jp). But
>> that's just for one trademark. Many companies have more than one trademark
>> or trading name they may wish to protect. And if the company's trademark
>> consists of two words and they have to worry about variants
>> (pizzahut.co.jp, pizza-hut.co.jp, pizzahut.jp, pizza-hut.jp) a block-out
>> strategy becomes economically impossible for all but the largest companies.
>> (note the irony that an original appeal of a gTLD was that you only needed
>> one name and anybody in the world could get in touch with you).
>>
>> So if there was a huge number of undifferentiated gTLDS requiring
>> registration of pizzahut.firm, pizza-hut.firm, etc., well, let's put it one
>> way. Pizza Hut would likely oppose such a scenario and you couldn't
>> criticize them for not putting ORSC's interests first. (p.s. The views
>> expressed herein are not necessarily those of Pizza Hut, which was the
>> first well known two word trademark I could think of. When in New York,
>> you may wish to try pizza at John's, with locations on Bleeker Street in
>> the Village and one on the West Side off Columbus).
>
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