[12350] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Name Reg. Time for Policy Change
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Mon May 16 17:33:23 1994
Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 14:29:47 -0400
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: "Mike Walsh"'s message of Mon, 16 May 94 00:22:33 -0500 <2978147187.1.p00426@psilink.com>
Re: Trademarks
A potentially solomonic solution (tho just like the original not
likely to make either party ecstatic) is to split a domain.
Thus, following Brad's (fictional) example of Apple Auto Glass and
Apple Computers (hey, how about Apple Records instead, they've been in
court before with Apple Computers over this) you could have:
computers.apple.com
records.apple.com
There's no particular reason why the underlying domain apple.com has
to be owned by either party, some neutral third party could be paid to
be the domain server for each (e.g. an NSP.) It's not trivial to set
this up, but it's not a lot of work either, it's done every day (tho
for other reasons such as different int'l branch offices.)
Obviously it gets a little bulky, but those examples could be
shortened. It's not even clear they need to be descriptive except
inasmuch as it would be convenient to humans (a.apple.com,
b.apple.com), it could be made slightly mnemonic (c.apple.com and
r.apple.com for computers and records respectively.)
Like I said, not ideal, but then again look at all the contortions
companies go thru to make 800 numbers fit some mnemonic. The absolute
worst I've ever seen is Soloflex's 1-800-976-XXXX (I forget what XXXX
was, something catchy like 0000.) To me "976" means "this call is
gonna cost you $3.99 a minute" which I don't *think* is the case here.
Dumb, dumb.
-Barry Shein
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