To: process.mail@wipo.int
Subject: Domain Name Process comment
From: "Chris Brand"
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:21:58 -0700
Hi,
I'm an "interested party" in that I'm a fairly extensive user of the internet. I've never owned any domain names and the only impact that the UDRP has on me at the moment is when I'm visiting a domain with a disputed name. I suspect that WIPO isn't really interested in the people who actually *use* DNS, but still...
Here are my (unsolicited) opinions on domain naming in general :
Firstly, there isn't room for everyone in .com, and having .org and .net duplicate .com doesn't help that. I'm perfectly capable of looking for a Canadian company in .ca, for an organisation in .org, for a US company in .co.us (not that I'll ever find one) and for a truly international company in .com. If I'm looking for trademarks other than the name of the organisation, I expect to find them as sub-domains or as pages on the organisation's site. If company Foo has a product names Bar, I'm not going to look for bar.com, I'm probably going to go to foo.com and search for "bar" or maybe I'll try bar.foo.com or foo.com/bar. Essentially, I understand how the DNS is supposed to work and it's actually easier for me (and cheaper for them) if owners or domain names actually respect that. As for "similar" names, such as the mis-spellings or company names, provided the site with the similar name doesn't pretend to be the site for the other company, I'll soon realize that I mis-typed and I'll correct my mistake and move on. So overall, I feel that the resolution process should err on limiting the number of domains owned by any given entity. If some company owns 300 domain names already and they try to use the resolution system to acquire 3 from another company which only owns those 3, then I'd probably want to maintain the status quo.
Secondly, there are always going to be cases where two parties both have a reasonable claim on a given domain name. In these cases, the only reasonable resolution is to leave the domain name with whoever registered it first.
Thirdly, it helps me, as a user of the internet, if entities are encouraged to put their domain in the "right" place in the hierarchy. When I'm looking for my local government, if I find a page at burnaby.bc.ca, I *know* I'm in the right place. I recognise that burnaby.com could be anything at all, so I'll look for burnaby.bc.ca first. If the city of Burnaby were to try to use the process to take burnaby.com away from another entity, I'd prefer them to fail. The fact that a lot of internet users are under the mistaken belief that "everything on the internet lives in .com" is *not* a good reason to make it true, creating an implicitly flat namespace. It is far better to let them learn where they should expect to find certain kinds of entities.
Now, having complained about the existing process, to the specific issues under consideration this time around :
Personal names - The first point about personal names is that there is, as yet. no obvious place in the DNS hierarchy to find individual's web sites. The second thing to recognise is that personal names are not unique. I am almost certainly not the only "Chris Brand" in the world, and the others have just as much right to the name as I do, regardless of our respective renown. Certainly, commercial use of my persona should be restricted, but again this doesn't mean that domain names containing my name should only be available to me. As a user of the internet, I have no illusions that gretagarbo.com has any association with the famous Greta Garbo. Why should it ? There are no doubt people in the world named Greta Garbo that the domain name may be owned by. There may well be a company called Gretagarbo. I do not believe that registering a domain name which coincides with a personal name is in itself a commercial use of that persona. It would, of course, be unfortunate if a company were to register "Chris Brand" as a trademark, but that it why the new gTLDs are coming into being - so it is clear that chris.brand.name is a web site for a person called Chris Brand while chrisbrand.com should be for a company called Chris Brand. I do believe that it reasonable for me to protest the ownership of chris.brand.name by someone who is not named Chris Brand.
Pharmaceutical substance names - The ones under consideration are, by definition, non-proprietary. Nobody owns the names, so they are just words like any other, and anyone should be able to register domains containing them, whether they sell the drug, use the drug, oppose it, give information about it, have a company named after it, or just think the name sounds good. If the World Health Organisation has a special interest in these words, they should feel free to create subdomains of their domain. I don't believe the WIPO should be involved with these words that are defined as not being intellectual property. It might be reasonable to request that *pharmaceutical* companies refrain from registering such domains, to prevent the appearance that they are the sole supplier, but as a user of the internet, I'm far more likely to type a drug name into a search engine than to try it as a domain name, and I certainly wouldn't expect to find any particular class of information at a domain named after a pharmaceutical.
International intergovernmental organisations - It does seem to be reasonable to give these organisations "first refusal" for "their" domain names in .int and *maybe* also .org (I believe that raising awareness of the .int domain is preferable to further regulation of .org). IGOs should have no protection in .com, which is for commercial entities. I would certain limit any protection to the name and the abbreviation of the IGO, explicitly allowing domain names containing the IGO name and additional words. As a user of the internet, I would not expect "wipo.com" to have any relationship to the WIPO IGO, so it should be afforded no special protection. I also believe that domain names such as "destroy_the_wipo.org" should be freely available.
Geographical indications - *Please* do not afford geographic indications any protection except in the geographic namespaces. Yes, the city of Miami should be able to register miami.fl.us but they should have no rights to miami.com, miami.net or miami.org. Again, this just encourages organisations to further clutter those 3 gTLDs and makes it harder for users to find the thing they're looking for. In particular, in the absence of any trademarks or fraudulent representation on the site in question, "champagne.org" seems like a perfectly acceptable domain name, regardless of use. As a user of the internet, if I were looking for information about the champagne region of France, the first place I'd look is "chapagne.fr". Note in particular that region names are not unique in the world. There are several cities called Birmingham and no doubt several companies and people also called Birmingham. Let's encourage the cities to register birmingham.uk and birmingham.al.us, the companies to register birmingham.com and the people to regsiter birmingham.name.
Trade Names - I'm generally against giving corporations any more power in internet-space than they've already acquired. I believe that trademarks are given too much power in the domain name system, but at least the list of trademarks is known (even if it is way too big to be usefully used to restrict domain name registrations). Due to the possibility of conflicts at the international level between legitimate trade names within a country, surely any restrictions have to be restricted to individual countries TLDs rather than the gTLDs ?
Note that with all of the above, I believe that is reasonable for an entity to request redress where a web page is designed to mislead the user into believing that it is associated with a given entity. The important point here is that the content of the web page is significant, not just the domain name.
Chris Brand
Burnaby
B.C.
Canada