Re: Domain Names and Trademarks

["Martin B. Schwimmer" <martys@interport.net>]

KathyrnKL@aol.com wrote:

"according to all studies conducting of the
Internet, the vast majority of use is for noncommercial purposes -- email,
chat rooms, research, education.  The vast majority of domain names are also
for noncommercial purposes:  personal websites, political websites, community
organization websites, email, FTP sites, etc. In the real world, these
noncommercial users of words do not have to preclear their use of any terms or
titles with a central Trademark office anywhere. For such a requirement to
exist in cyberspace would be a great burden on speech worldwide."


Could you please provide citations to "all studies"  Maybe it is a
semantical difference but if you look at the measure of activity - hits -
it seems that the most popular sites - yahoo.com, the various search
engines, cnn.com, amazon.com - are all commercial enterprises.  If you use
altavista to do educational research, your personal use is educational but
altavista's use of the domain name is very very commercial, and someone who
adopts a mis-spelling of altavista (do a whois search of the names owned by
Data Arts, which specializes in mis-spellings) would appear to be
benefitting from DEC's goodwill in the ALTAVISTA mark and domain name.

While it is not readily apparent why harmonizing the DNS with trademark law
is an unnecessary burden on speech - after all, in this discussion group
you were not prevented from making political speech using the aol.com
domain name - perhaps clearly labeled "personal" or "non-commercial" gTLDs
that did not require pre-clearing, while commercial gTLDs would be subject
to pre-clearing - would represent the accomodation of non-commercial use
and the pre-existing trademark rights of the world's businesses?  If
non-commercial use is in fact responsible for the vast majority of domain
names, then the for-profit registries would back this proposal.  If their
interest is in accomodating name speculators, then they might not.

P.S.  I wanted to access the domain names rights coalition web site at
dnrc.org and instead got the Dogbert New Ruling Class web site.