The court's ruling is very clear. Since Mr. Ambler seems
to have a hard time understanding it, the first sentence of the article pretty much
sums it up:"A federal California court this week ruled trademark and service mark
protections did not apply to generic domain extensions."
This means you cannot
trademark a gTLD, like .web or .firm. You CAN trademark a specific domain name, like
crypton.web, however you must meet several requirements (available at the USPTO website).
The
bottom line in this ruling is that, much to Image Online Design's displeasure, they
do not own the rights to .web. ICANN has every right to select another company to
run the .web registry and IOD can do nothing about it. The claiming of a trademark
for an entire gTLD was nothing more than a attempt by IOD to legally secure their
position as the .web registry.
The writing on the wall is clear Mr. Ambler, you
lost in your bid to own .web and create a monopoly reminiscent of NSI. You might
want to remove that TM from all instances of .web on your website, since you don't
legally own the trademark.
As for Ambler's claims of running the only "commercial-scale
registry in operation right now" (excluding NSI), this is a very suspect claim. As
an Internet programmer for a web consulting firm, I can tell you that it would take
little effort to create a setup like what is at webtld.com. It doesn't take a whole
lot of genius or money to develop a SQL (or comparable) database interfacing with
ASP pages. Any semi-competent web development firm or developer could create a similar
backend setup within a day or two.
While it is obvious that I am at odds with IOD
over their practices, they still deserve as fair a shot as anybody else when it comes
to the new registries. However I feel that their tactics are quite questionable.
The trademark situation shows that.
It's also not surprising that nearly all the
people in support of IOD are stakeholders in the firm. If ICANN was to decide that
no pre-registrations of .web would stand, these IOD supporters would have no real
pressing reason to support their bid for the .web registry. If that's not obvious,
I don't know what is. The bottom line is that IOD accepted (and accepts) money for
services which they KNOW they may not be able to provide. They do not deserve to
be selected (and bailed out) simply because they have collected money for .web domains.
Other companies and organizations should be considered as well, including those that
are non-profit.
People who are truly interested shaping how the Internet naming
system is run are not the people who have pre-registered x amount of .web domains
through IOD and support them SOLEY because of this. So let's get down to business
and discuss the real issues here.