Trademark Owners Rights.

[MISSYEGG@aol.com]

To Whom It May Concern,

I am a trademark owner who recently got more involved in understanding the 
design and set-up process of businesses on the Internet, including the name 
registration system,  although I have a business on the Internet. When I 
initially set-up my site 5 years ago, and for the past 5 years I was told by 
my previous Hosting Server that my companies name was alrealy registered, and 
I had no legal rights to the name.

I recently saw a television news broadcast that said I do have some rights.  
The problem begans with, the time limits that are put on a company to notify 
the registrar (1) when a Trademark owner realizes they do have rights (2) the 
Trademark owner of the company is not aware of those rights, because they are 
doing business as usual and the Hosting company has no interest to fight for 
the Trademark owner for its name or the Hosting company is also not 
knowledgeable there can be an opportunity to file a complaintfor the 
Trademark owner, because this information is not advertised in the daiy news 
paper or on television or to domain name registrants/owners, just on the 
Internet (3) the current registrar of the domain name holds the name for a 
long period of time and never uses the domain name, until the Trademark owner 
finally finds out they do have rights and the current Domain name owner wants 
to charge the Trademark owner $50,000 for the company to buy the Domain name 
from them.  This is clearly unfair business practices, and there should be a 
law against it.

I never knew how to get in touch with Internic until I had to fight to save 
my business, because the Hosting company had registered the website under 
their name.  It then took about 3 months of fighting and learning the 
Internic's process to re-register my company's name under my name.

I'm saying all of this to say, now I'm finding out there is hope of me 
fighting to get my registered tradmark name, (I am the only Federal Trademark 
owner officially registered to this name), and the person wants me to pay 
them $50,000.  They have never used the name, but has just been holding it.  
I've written them, and now I will follow Internic's procedure.  The time 
periods allowed have to be longer because there is a large world of 
understanding the internet and I know there are business people such as my 
self who are just learning all of the organizational structure of the 
internet.  

It should be against the law for someone to charge you much more than 
Internic charges for a name registration.  If this is allow where does the 
control of domain name registration have any real meaning.  Then we should 
let the Government continue to handle the operations, because it becomes 
unfair practices for businesses.

I am going to fight my way through this, and I would like to have a chance to 
participate in future question and answer sessions.

I can be reached at:  missyegg@aol.com

The domain name in dispute is musicquest.com.  I've recently registared 
musicquest.net.  I learned how to do this myself.

Thank you in advance for