Registration Contact Details

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

Prof. Mueller wrote:

>By way of background, British Telecom is a company that appears to believe
that
>it owns the letters "bt" and has a right to sue anyone who uses them in the
>second level of a domain name. British Telecom sued to obtain ownership of
>"bt.org" despite that TLD's association with noncommecial entities, and
despite
>the interest of the Brooklyn Tabernacle in that domain.

Is it useful to re-litigate the One In A Million case, where defendants
were represented by people who had actually studied the law and were
admitted to practice, and still lost?  Then they lost before an appellate
tribunal.

For those of you who look to Mueller as some type of intellectual leader,
you may want to re-examine the judgment of an associate communications
professor who refers to a specialist judge deciding a case in his field
(and not Mueller's field) after a full trial with evidence, as "ignorant."
I suppose the appellate court was ignorant too.  

As for the Brookyln Tabernacle red herring, these defendants had targeted
BT, applying for domain names consisting of several of its trademarks. The
"ignorant" judge, who got a chance to look at the defendants, had no
illusions that these were, as Mueller would have us believe, choir boys.

And as for the economic usefulness of all this?  Why justify name
speculation?  There is no economic value added.  The bt.org could have gone
to the Brooklyn Tabernacle for merely the registration fee if the
speculator had not interceded.

Choose your own economic hero - the company who has created a business and
seeks to protect it - or the parasitic name speculators who creates no
value and feel they have a right to profit off anyone, even the Brooklyn
Tabernacle.  Who do you identify with?  The professor appears to identify
with the parasite.

Regardless of whether there is dispute resolution or registration
requirements in the DNS, if someone goes after rights owners in the way One
In A Million did, the rights owner is going to go after them.  And maybe
because there wasn't any verifiable information in the registration
statement, the rights owner will have to go after the registrar.  Mueller
will not be there to help them with their legal fees - he will be onto his
next interest, perhaps a visiting-professor gig in Singapore.