[Upd-discuss] famous trademarks and Internet TLDs

[Michael H. Davis]

The first thing to note, Jamie, it seems to me would be that URLs and
domain names are not trademarks. The recent U.S. legislation makes it quite
clear that except in case of a "bad faith" attempt to extort money from an
entity who may own rights to a trade mark which is similar or identical to
a proposed or awarded domain name, the owner of the domain name has every
right to continue to own it despite the trademark owner's desires. So why
would ICANN even be considering something that is not only not required by
trademark law, but is expressly excluded? Furthermore, of course, there is
no such thing as an international trademark and the trademark law that
relates to "famous names," contained in statute and treaty, only forbids
the REGISTRATION AS A TRADE MARK, or allows cancellation of the same, but
goes no further than that.

Mickey