RE: [IFWP] Re: Hilights from today's hearing

[Bill Lovell]

At 06:20 PM 7/23/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Bill Lovell wrote:
>> I'll admit to having a problem with gTLDs: .web is fine, but someone
>> was posing the case in which an attorney wanted "something.law,"
>> but the folks owning .law charge too much, are incompetent, etc.
>
>This problem vanishes if we demand an administrative infrastructure that
>explicitly supports registrars providing customer service to registrants,
>irrespective of TLD.  In other words, I want to register in *.foo?  I go to
>ANY registrar, or the one with which I have a strong previous relationship,
>or have heard good things about, etc.  This is what competition is all
>about.
>
>TLDs cannot be treated as property or if someone wishes to treat them as
>such, they should be required to protect their intellectual property rights
>in a court of law, not through administrative fiat imposed through arbitrary
>totalitarian control.

The problem can be exemplified by .per, for which ownership rights in the
gTLD have been claimed. The service company model I was talking about
would have zero right of "administrative fiat" -- someone wants a name
registered, so long as it (by which I mean the whole xxx.yyy thing) is not
already mapped to an IP, it is  gets registered. If someone thinks they own
the .yyy gTLD, they go sue the party that had xxx.yyy registered (not the
registrar, which should have total immunity in its purely administrative role)
-- it's as simple as that, and the first such suit would answer the question.

(As an IP attorney, I have severe doubts that anything that has such a functional
role as a gTLD would be subject to trademark protection, in the same way
that there is no copyright protection for functional components.  But wadda
I know?)

(I might add that I don't understand Richard Sexton's response to yours of
above when he says you've not eliminated the problem but just moved it.
Richard?)

Bill Lovell

>--
>Rob Raisch CTO - RivalWorks, Inc. <http://www.rivalworks.com>
>Who do you want to play today?
>