Re: [idn] what are the IDN identifiers?

["Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <froomkin@law.miami.edu>]

> > In the US, we have an anti-cybersquatting law where I can't register 
> > EXXON.com because of the Trademark owned by EXXON. Likewise, I can't 

This is a slight over-simplification of US law.  You may be able to
register exxon.com quite legally for certain purposes, including parody,
and especially non-commercial purposes (e.g. an environmental group that
wished to complain about something Exxon was doing).

In any case, exxon, which is (1) a "coined" (made up) mark for (2) a very
very famous company is a member of a small class of names where there are
likely few legitimate registrants other than the mark-holder.  Relax
either constraint and there are usually a substantial number of potential
legal registrants.

> > register EXXON?com (note the new multilingual character) because of  
> > the same Trademark law. The WIPO appears to be of the same focus and 

WIPO's focus is ordinarily to expand the rights that markholders have.
WIPO's agenda includes enforcing existing legal rules (and seeking to
avoid making it easy to flout existing legal rules) but is not limited to
that.

> > I am sure that other countries will follow with similar legislation. 
> > The Trademark problem will work it's self out in the course of time 
> > on a case by case basis regardless of any preemptive actions taken 
> > by  the IDN WG.
> > 

On this we agree: it is now clear that the legal system in a continually
increasing number of countries has caught on to trademark-on-the-Internet
and DNS issues and is coping with them quite well.

[back to lurking]

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