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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49
Adam Back (aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk)
Mon, 1 Mar 1999 23:39:02 GMT
Michael Froomkin writes about domain names and copyright/trademark
wars.
The cryptograhic solution to the problem is first come first served.
.to (Tonga) has the right idea, strictly first come first served,
trademarks do not exist in Tonga.
The rest of the brawl it is just corporates lobbying for imposing
existing local trademark dispute resolution mechanisms on to the
global internet domains.
A simple solution is to denote a part of the domain space as subject
to international trademark dispute resolution processes. We could do
with a .corp or .tm (trademark). Local trademark laws could be
reasonably held to apply to localised versions: .corp.us, .corp.uk,
.corp.za etc. (What is the .tm in your .sig Michael? is that a
country?) (I suggest a new domain to prevent bad feeling about
existing .com domains: people are going to be annoyed if some
organisation comes along and seizes their .com domain to reallocate to
a trademark owner.)
Let the trademark wars occur in the new .corp domains.
Leave the rest of the domain space out of it, and make the rest
strictly first come first served.
That keeps the corporates and their lawyers happy, and gets them out
of our hair.
Michael goes on to describe some kind of identity-escrow system to
prevent one person owning many domains(?)
Here are a few problems with this type of system:
- why should one person not be allowed to own as many domains as he
has money for?
- how can you prevent me laundering my identity through a few dozen
friends even if you have a DNA sample based identity escrow agent for
domain ownership.
- how do you identity domain speculation (it's a fuzzy concept; I can
trivially make up plausible sounding reasons to use a domain, populate
web pages with related info, find someone with the domain as a surname
or whatever).
- what is wrong with domain speculation?
I think the only answer is to keep it very simple. Create a ".corp"
play pen for the corporates and their lawyers to play in, and declare
the rest officially first come first serve. Also there should be
clear defined rules for expiry. Ownership of a domain should not
require a street address, or real name.
Preferably the domainname -> IP address look up system should be
distributed across jurisdictions to make it easier for governments and
local legal systems to resist the temptation to escape from their
.corp play pen and mess up the rest of the domain system.
It would be nice, though harder, to design a DNS lookup system which
made it hard for a node in the DNS system to recognise a DNS request
when it arrived.
Adam
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49