Question: What do you think of the recent disputes between trademark holders (and similar claimants), and owners of domains? For example, the recent Barcelona.com case, and also about the disputes regarding Corinthians, and celebrities' (common) names? Most importantly, what will be your policies in these types of cases? Thank-you.

Nominee Replies

Alf Hansen - posted on 2000-10-08 13:54:17 I will not discuss specific cases, but my view is the following: When you register a domain name, you get no more legal rights to use this name than you had before. This means that if you register, say oledole.com, and oledole is a trademark owned by The OleDole Company, you must be prepared for a lawsuit or a UDRP process, and you will lose. Another opposite example: I am a small company called QRPZ Import., QRPZ is my registered and protected trademark in Norway, and I register qrpz.com. Later the big international company Quality Research Profile Zero sues me (or uses UDRP against me) because they also want qrpz.com They have a registered and protected trademark QRPZ in the USA. In this case I should win because I registered my domain first. Jeanette Hofmann - posted on 2000-10-08 12:38:05 In my view, the dispute on domain names is a classic distributional conflict. Part of this conflict is a reinterpretation of the very function of domain names. The DNS wasn't invented and never meant to reflect real names and trademarks. What is more, the DNS is not sophisticated enough to accommodate all users' rights to names. Thus, I would speak up for a proposal that has been around for at least 5 years: 1. the implementation of a directory system able to reflect all forms of real names, 2. a significant expansion of the name space beyond the 5 - 10 new TLDs we might get by the end of this year.