The Worldwide Domain Battle

pledibus writes "The New York Times's Sunday magazine contains an interesting article, Get Out of My Namespace, about the spate of conflicts over website names. The author synthesizes ideas from computer technology, law, history, onomastics, cultural anthropology, and probably a few other areas, and does a pretty nice job of it."

No.

[dolo666]

Impossible to police, impossible to control, and totally against everything the Net was designed to be. Sorry, but no country will govern the net and if one should try to, they will have a huge problem on their hands. What is needed is not more regulation, but more insightful systems design. That's all.

Whatever the rules are...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they should be unambiguous and consistent. It shouldn't be based on who has the biggest lawyers.

Is the internet too big for humanity?

[G4from128k]

Perhaps the problem is that the internet is too massively large for the human mind, social systems, and trademark laws to handle. Everyone thinks they are coming up with a unique, non-overlapping, name from everyone else. But once the system becomes too larger, very few names are unique. In reality, all the "good" names are taken and even all the easy variants of the good names are taken. Its a case of too many people and too few names.

The case of confusing/typoed near-names (ggle.com) is also a human scalability problem. If one only interacted within a tribe or small group (say 100 individuals), a typo or near-name would still be unambiguous.

People (and their social/legal systems) weren't designed to connect directly to millions or billions of others.

I'd expect more from Gleick

[Anonymous Coward]

"A few of the words and phrases trademarked in the most recent batch this month were DRIVE HARDER, RELAXED LUXURY, MYASSISTANT, A COFFEE SHOP IN YOUR OFFICE, FLEXIBLE THINKER (a Canadian motivational speaker), RINGWRAITH (the Tolkien moviemakers still going strong) and DOING HIS TIME (for ''transportation of families of prison inmates''). Are any of these so special, creative or individual that ownership rights ought to be assigned?"

Trademarks are not assigned to promote the creation of interesting individual names. Otherwise, they would fall under the "promote the useful arts and sciences" clause of the constitution, and thus would have limited duration.

Trademarks exist forever, as long as they are actively used -- because their enforcement puts MORE information at the public's finger tips, not LESS. The purpose of trademarks is not to defend some "property" of the long-dead guy who named Colt firearms, but to defend YOUR right to know who made the products you buy, right here, today.

As such, they can be as ugly or common place as you want. The point is to stop other people from confusingly marketing a similar product under a similar mark. Trademarks are actually a consumer-protection issue, not an "intellectual property" issue. It is the confusion of lumping very different aspects of law into one vague name that leads to mistakes such as this.

I don't think I am nit-picking here. This is a serious mistake. The misuse of trademarks for the purpose of censorship or harassment would be much less common if the general public had a sense that trademarks "belonged" to THE PUBLIC, as a truth-in-labeling concept.

Re:Is the internet too big for humanity?

[Dark Lord Seth]

People (and their social/legal systems) weren't designed to connect directly to millions or billions of others.

Nope. But back in the 50s and 60s the US social system wasn't designed for a non-segregated soceity. Trust me, humanity will adept over time. That, or we'll nuke ourselves into oblivion before we adept. So far so good though...

Re:Having read the entire article,

[Anonymous Coward]

Right -- notice how a big company needs to be engaged in commerce to hold the trademark, and the ICCAN / WIPO Nazis then turn around and use any commercial activity by a little guy as evidence of bad faith.

Re:Brand Name War.... Taken to the Net

[pommiekiwifruit]

That would be silly. A lot of the interesting technical info I have found is on individuals' home pages, not on the pages of corporations (many of whom are only interested in putting up annoying content-free flash animations).

Is it really a problem?

[wfberg]

I'd argue that companies with famous brands should get the least amount of protection possible. This is simply because;

1) if their brand is so valuable, why don't they pay the schmoe who registered their domain what it's worth?

2) BigCorp can blast its URL over many communications, like commercials, logoes, branding, etc.; obviously, having an easy-to-remember URL is more important for those less fortunate.

3) Do you even type in a company's name and append .com anymore? You either look on their products for their URL, or you google for it. We all learnt to do this the hard way (whitehouse.com).

4) If a website is actually confusing consumers, or commiting libel; sue em. Don't need no UDRP. If it's too cosrly to sue some-one operating in alaska, well, then your brand isn't famous enough, get yourself a country (ccTLD) domain name.

The whole ICANN/UDRP/WIPO trademark circus is a big joke. Especially when they took away the possibility to register domain names (for free..) in the nice hierarchical XX.us state (sub)domains.

Multinational Companies

[Detritus]

The problem is that many corporations and brands are multinational. A corporation may be legally registered and operating in dozens of countries, not to mention many more countries where their products are sold. The company's headquarters may be in the United States, but the majority of its employees and facilities may be overseas.

Re:Whatever the rules are...

[jfengel]

Lawyers try very hard to be unambiguous and consistent. They produce pages and pages of prose full of technical terms trying to narrow down exactly who owns what.

(I'm talking about lawyers working in good faith, which is most of them. It's the creeps that make the news, but most lawyers are just trying to be clear.)

Unfortunately, the additional verbiage causes problems of its own. First, the technical terms aren't always accessible until you've had background. You do the same thing as a computer programmer; just because you know the difference between an "icon" and an "operating system" without thinking doesn't mean the difference is readily apparent to somebody who has unfamiliar with computers.

Second, the additional verbiage makes inconsitencies more likely. As a programmer you know perfectly well that adding code to a program makes it buggier. Same thing: the more lawyers try to clarify your rights, the more likely it is that they're accidentally creating loopholes.

(Again, remember that I'm talking about the good ones, not the assholes. Actually, the assholes create a whole new difficulty, because everybody has to assume everybody else is an asshole and fight tooth and nail for their rights, so you end up acting like an asshole yourself. But that's a different point; I'm going for the point that it's hard even without the assholes.)

Unlike software, people are difficult. Who really knows if Apple Computer should be prevented from going into music by Apple Records? The number of "corner cases" is extraordinary. I wish it were always possible to make rules that were simple, unambiguous, consistent, and _fair_ (something you left out, but which is crucial). But often it simply isn't.

I once found that hard to take. In computers, there's always a solution. It's not always practical (you can't really rewrite the operating system because you found a bug in it), but it's at least possible, or you can show why it's impossible. In managing people there's an ugly gray area that's always bigger than you want it to be. Lawyers attack the problem with words. I wish I had a better solution.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Online Law

[jdreed1024]

The last thing we need is more laws. What we need is more common sense. For all cases involving domain name/trademark disputes, the following things need to be taken into account:

• original intent
• type of product/service being offered
• whether the person's legal name is involved
• whether consumers will be confused

So, for, example, if my last name was Ford, and I made, say, house paint, and I registered fordhousepaint.com, Ford Motor Company shouldn't get to do jack shit. No consumer in the world, no matter how low their IQ, is going to purchase my house paint and then claim confusion and think they were getting a car. However, if Ford didn't have a website, and I registered Ford.com, and just had a parked page there, it would be pretty clear that I was doing it in the hope of extorting money from Ford.

Now, there are some corner cases, as always. The MikeRoeweSoft thing is very unusual. Mike Roewe was his real name, and he did have a software company. Does it sound the same as another Redmond, WA company? Yes. However, it was pretty clear from the site that he wasn't Bill Gates, and the odds that some consumer would hear about the real microsoft, and want to go to their website, yet not know how to spell their domain name, and came up with MikeRoeweSoft on their own - well that's pretty slim. Personally, I think he should have won that case.

And, using the Ford example from above, if my last name was Ford, and I registered ford.com, and on it I had a huge website, with pages for every member of my family, and a history of the family, and all my relatives had @ford.com e-mail addresses, and then Ford suddenly decides they want to cash in on this e-commerce thing and sues me, well that's a sticky situation. Technically, I was there first, and I'm clearly not pretending to make cars, nor am I interested in selling them my domain name for any price, and technically, they're not Ford either, they're Ford Motor Company. But I guess I don't have a good solution for that situation.

Really, two important things would have prevented this whole problem:

• If the damn media hadn't convinced the world that everything ends in .com, then we could have only companies have a .com domain, and we'd create some other TLD for people's personal sites. And Ford Motors could have ford.com, and I could have ford.me or ford.personal or something. The TLDs are now totally and completely useless for determining what kind of site is what now that .com, .net, and .org are used for everything. And it's totally the media's fault. A not insignificant number of people have tried to add .com onto the end of my .edu e-mail address when e-mailing me. It's pretty darn sad.
• Domain name disputes should be handled like a small claims court. Plaintiff, defendant, judge, and maybe a few witnesses. And if one party fails to show up 3 times, the case is automatically decided in favor of the defendant. Even someone who is in the right and deserves to win a domain dispute often can't because of high-priced lawyers who file every fucking motion in the book to stall a trial for like 5 years. In fact, I'd watch that on CourtTV. Like the People's Court, but the Domain Court. Heh.