On 12/29/2009 04:57 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
In the long term, a GNSO committee (of which I'm a member) is working to define statements of registrants' rights -- both to enumerate what exists and to develop a manifesto, so to speak, of what they ultimately should be.
Moving away from domain name practices that are questionable, one might want to look at another issue, which is the panic driven, and potentially expensive, drive to splatter protective registrations across all TLDs... I have been advocating in certain legal forums and meetings that we in the US consider an amendment to the Lanham Act, which is the US' trademark law, to say something along these lines: No person who has a US Federally registered mark shall lose any protection of that mark as a result of not acquiring any domain name in any or all top level or subordinate domains. The idea here is to prevent the panic driven registration of names on the basis of a perceived (or law-firm drummed-up frenzy) need to register everywhere in order to protect the base rights in a trademark. Now, given that trademarks are only a small part of the range of rights that people might have in names - such as their personal names, the names of their deity(ies), the names of their residences, etc - perhaps I ought to rephrase things so that the proposal becomes: No person who has a US Federally registered mark or other cognizable rights in a name or phrase shall lose any protection of that mark, name or phrase as a result of not acquiring any domain name in any or all top level or subordinate domains. --karl--