[142112] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: ICANN to allow commercial gTLDs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay Ashworth)
Fri Jun 17 23:40:04 2011
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 23:39:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>
To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <559C9BE3-9EF9-455B-AB6B-AC9A76E16553@delong.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Owen DeLong" <owen@delong.com>
> MacDonald's would likely get title to .macdonalds under the new rules,
> right?
>
> Well... Which MacDonald's?
>
> 1. The fast food chain
> 2. O.C. MacDonald's Plumbing Supply
> 3. MacDonald and Sons Paving Systems
> 4. MacDonald and Madison Supply Company
> 5. etc.
>
> All of them have legitimate non-conflicting trademarks on the name MacDonald's
> (or at least could, I admit I made some of them up). I said when this mess
> first started that mapping trademarks to DNS would only lead to dysfunction.
> It did. Now the dysfunction is becoming all-encompassing. It will be
> interesting to watch the worlds IP lawyers (IP as in Intellectual Property,
> not Internet Protocol)
> eat their young over these issues for the next several decades.
Indeed.
It's actually "McDonalds", of course, and the US trademark law system has
a provision for "famous" marks. I don't recall what the rules are, but
once they've decide your mark is "famous", then it no longer competes only
in its own line-of-business category; *no one* can register a new mark in
any category using your word.
Coca-Cola, Sony, and I think Kodak, are the canonical examples of a
famous mark.
http://www.quizlaw.com/trademarks/what_is_a_famous_trademark.php
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
