Here is an objection to a sunrise period and it sums it perfectly:
Two Objections
to the IPC "Famous Names" or "Sunrise" Proposals for Controlling Entry Into New gTLDs
Richard
Sexton
John Berryhill, Ph.D. esq.
(1) - The Exclusionary Proposals Have No Basis
In Technology Or Law
These comments essentially boil down to the fundamental maxim
of Law, "Where there is a right, there is a remedy." The ICANN Intellectual Property
Constituency's various exclusion or "sunrise" proposals are not in accordance with
the remedial nature of the Law. These proposals are for prospective, pre-emptive
restraints of the kind that we do not permit our own government to exert in the enforcement
of criminal law relating to the use of words. Even where an injunction is granted,
an injunction is (a) directed to identifiable individuals, (b) for cause and (c)
based on an adjudication of relative harms. Why should private individuals have greater
power to pre-empt the actions of others to prevent potential civil liability when
we do not grant government that power to prevent criminal violations?
A trademark
gives the owner a right to seek a remedy for a violation of the trademark. Trademarks
do not provide an automatic, a priori pre-emption of the use of alphanumeric characters
in the real world. Trademark law has developed to balance various interests. There
is no reason to provide a new kind of trademark right on the Internet which does
not correspond to any principle ot trademark law in the offline world.
The IPC
proposals have perverted Law to "Where there is a right, there is a way to prevent
people from violating it." That has never been the way Law functions in our society,
and it has certainly never been the way the Internet functions. If it's not "technical
administration", and if it is not "law", then what is it? Technical concerns say
(a) domain name allocations are to follow RFC1591 - first come, first served and
(b) there is a need for a larger name space. The Law says that RFC1591 has valid
legal regulatory authority (as per the PGMedia decision of the DC Court of Appeals)
and that violations of private rights can be remedied after the fact. The IPC proposals
do not arise from valid technical or legal principles.
MichaelKirkIsaPedophile.com
is libelous, and has legal consequences as a string of text.
HaveSexWithMeForMoney.com
is a criminal solicitation.
TheHolocaustIsaJewishLie.com is likewise a criminal
utterance, but in Germany, not the U.S.
MuhammadTheProphetAtePork.com is blasphemous
and likely a capital offense in several countries.
Yet, despite these and other
categories of legally significant alphanumeric character sequences, some even criminal
in nature, nobody is proposing a prior restraint on them.
Trademark infringement
is only a subset of a much larger category of legally-proscribable uses of alphanumeric
characters. Why, among all forms of legally significant text strings, are trademarks
singled out for a heretofore unknown pre-emptive right? Because ICANN, a technical
body, has an "Intellectual Property Constituency" with non-technical concerns.
There
is no "Libel Constituency", "Anti-Obscenity Constituency", "Criminal Solicitation
Constituency", or "Religious Constituency". Why not? Because these issues do not
relate to technical administration, which is the mandated mission of ICANN.
Despite
the talk about the "importance of stability to the development of e-commerce", ICANN
was not chartered to be about commerce or whatever else for which the internet might
be used. They are supposed to be running narrow technical aspects of a computer network.
"Do the bits get from one end of a wire to the other?" is not a legal question. Re-engineering
the remedial principle of law as a proscriptive technical policy makes no sense.
Trademark
infringement happens in telephone book listings. All kinds of shady folks get fradulent
telephone book listings, or use "Yellow Page" ads which infringe trademarks or convey
a false or unfair commercial impression. These situations are dealt with all of the
time by trademark lawyers. They are not dealt with by providing a pre-emptive famous
name list or a sunrise period for telephone books. In fact, the makers of the telephone
books are not held liable for these kinds of things. In the context of 800 number
assignments, the FCC has decided that dealing with trademark issues is a job for
trademark lawyers, and not for technology policy makers at the FCC. Why should ICANN
be any different?
The DNS is a telephone book. It maps names to numbers in precisely
the same way. Why is it that we manage to publish telephone books without difficulty?
Why would we argue about adding a new telephone exchange in an area code, become
concerned that the possibility of a greater number of telephone listings would provide
more opportunities for trademark infringement, and suggest that it would subject
the telephone book publishers to legal liability? Because they are ridiculous assertions.
But somehow the analogous assertions are taken seriously in the context of the DNS.
Even
when someone has successfully asserted a trademark right involving a telephone listing,
the books themselves are not published again until a year later. The DNS can be altered
within a matter of hours to reflect a succesful, and remedial, assertion of trademark
rights. That serves the interests of IP owners even more efficiently than an analogous
system -phone books - with which we have lived comfortably for years.
To make the
picture even clearer. I can infringe trademarks with my business card, letterhead
stationery or outdoor signs. But when I walk into the print shop, there is no IP
daemon sitting on the shoulder of the printer with the job of determining what words
I may or may not have imprinted on my business materials. I bear the legal consequences
of my choice, but I am
as free as anyone else to have my own business materials
without having to wait outside during a "sunrise period" in which the "first among
equals" negotiated what is to be left over for me to have.
And so we develop a
byzantine system of chartered and non-chartered TLDs, and a system of restrictions
and lists and sunrise periods on top of that. The next day after I, a lowly individual,
am allowed to register domain names with the great unwashed masses, I obtain generic.generic
(in the new "generic" TLD). And the day after that I set up my server to resolve
the URL:
kodak.ibm.cocacola.generic.generic/kiddieporn.html . Then what did any
of this nonsense buy for anyone other than delay and large expense account bills?
Bold
prediction #1 - there will continue to be rampant intellectual property violations
on the Internet.
Bold prediction #2 - there will be no way to prevent it, but there
will remain remedies at law.
(2) - Artificial Constriction of the Name Space by
the IPC is Hurting Small Business
There already are mechanisms to enforce trademark
rights in cyberspace - the UDRP and the ACPA among them. Both of these mechanisms
are available to anyone who can afford a lawyer, which, with the UDRP, includes many
but not all small businesses. Genuine cybersquatting hurts small businesses in smaller
gross monetary terms, but perhaps in larger proportionate terms for
the affected
businesses, than it does larger businesses.
However, when BigBusinessCo is faced
with a squatter who has occupied BigBusinessCo.com, .net and .org, then BigBusinessCo
can readily afford to get rid of the squatter. Joe's Fish Market is faced with a
much larger problem, because they cannot so readily afford to do the same thing.
The
presence of a large, and we mean very large, number of TLDs does two things to help
Joe's Fish Market - it increases the cost of pre-emptive cybersquatting and it decreases
the value of any one domain name occupied but not used.
If someone is sitting on
the domain "cocacola.irrelevant", not producing any content at a corresponding website,
and demanding thousands of dollars from Coca-Cola, then why would anyone, including
Coca-Cola care? The commercial injury to Coca-Cola of a tiny vacant island in a sea
of thousands of TLDs is approximately zero. In fact, it is actually zero. The squatter
with his do-nothing domain name can pay annual registration fees to his heart's content
and remain unnoticed and ignored.
Now, yes, there is such a thing as trademark
infringement, but if the only thing one sees at a web site is "This Domain for Sale!"
or "We Registered At Lousynames.com!" then what is the basis for any consumer to
be confused about anything? They were looking for a brown fizzy beverage in a red
can. "Hmm.... must not be at this domain name...."
Conclusions
Several have floated
a compromise proposal of a mixture of "chartered" versus "non-chartered" TLDs, and
how many of each there should be. The question of how many is comparable to the question
of whether it would be a good idea to have a large quantity of even numbers or odd
numbers.
In fact, there is no good reason not to have an infinite supply of both.
The mechanisms
for restricting registrations according to various pre-emptive systems are flawed
technically as they do not accord with RFC1591, and they are flawed legally as they
do not accord with the remedial character of Law as we in the West have come to know
it over a learning
curve of hundreds of years. The IPC does not have the technical
background to dictate how to run the Internet, and WG-B does not have the legal sophistication
to re-write fundamental principles of trademark law, or law generally, in single
weekend.
This is not how to run a computer network.
Richard Sexton
Bannockburn,
Ontaria
CA
richard@vrx.net
rich@rd.sexton
John Berryhill, Ph.D. esq
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania
US
john@johnberryhill.com
The following individuals endorse the
comments above:
Mikki Barry
ooblick@netpolicy.com
Judith Oppenheimer
icbtollfree.com
joppenheimer@icbtollfree.com
Mark C. Langston
mark@bitshift.org
Systems & Network Admin
San Jose, CA
Gordon
Cook
publisher, The Cook Report
cook@cookreport.com
Gene Marsh
president,
anycastNET Incorporated
marshm@anycast.net
Dena Whitebirch
@quasar Internet
Solutions, Inc.
shore@quasar.net
Christopher Ambler
Image Online Design
chris@the.web
John
Palmer
jp@ADNS.NET
Peter da Silva
peter@taronga.com
David Schutt
Speco,
Inc
david@speco.com
Michael Brian Scher
Anthropologist, Attorney, Policy Analyst
strange@netural.com
Mike
Sondow
International Congress of Independent Internet Users
msondow@iciiu.org
Joseph
Baptista
baptista@pccf.net
Dan Steinberg
SYNTHESIS:Law & Technology
synthesis@travel-net
Philippe
Landau
info@A-Z-Internet.com
Kai Henningsen
kaih@khms.westfalen.de
See http://www.open-rsc.org/issues/sunrise/
for more signatures.