So you may well be asking yourself, what does all of this have to do with the Net, anyway? It's a good question. There are a couple of ways in which trademark law has an important bearing on activities in cyberspace..
The one that has gotten the most attention thus far involves the question of Internet domain names. As you probably know, machines that are connected to the Internet must have an "address" - a unique identifier that belongs to it and it alone, so that messages can be routed correctly among the millions of machines that constitute the global network..
The problem is, these names might conflict with already- established trademarks in the non-virtual world. You may have heard about Joshua Quittner, a reporter for Wired magazine, who registered the "www.mcdonalds.com" domain for himself (and, just to have a little fun, wrote a column asking readers for suggestions on how to dispose of this interesting little piece of property). McDonalds was not amused, and although McDonalds and Quittner settled their dispute, there have been a couple of lawsuits filed by other trademark holders, and there are several dozen other disputes of this kind. Roadrunner.com was claimed by a small New Mexico computer company - and Warner Brothers has asserted that this use infringes on its trademarked cartoon character. Newton.com was claimed by a gentleman by the name of Mark Newton, much to the displeasure of Apple Computers. And the Gap, Inc. has complained about the registration of the name "thegap.com" given out to Genesis Access Point, an Internet Service Provider in Northern Ireland..
You might want to take a look at the "What's In A Name" web page at http://www.cli.org for lots of information about these disputes..
Only one case has been decided thus far, in which a court ordered the Internet Engineering Group to give up the "www.candyland.com" address (which they were using for something called "Club Love") after a complaint by Hasbro, Inc. (manufacturers of the children's game "Candyland")..
This is surely not the last we will hear of this issue. Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), the company controlling addressing on the Internet in the US under contract with the National Science Foundation, used to give out domain names on a simple first come, first served basis. But no more. NSI's policy, adopted last year, and is currently in the process of revision after much debate on the Net and off, requires all applicants to promise that their use of a particular domain name will not infringe anyone else's trademark rights. The NSI policy also declares that NSI will force you to relinquish your domain name if anyone shows them a trademark registration for that name issued by any national government. (See http://rs.internic.net for NSI=92s registration services and current policies.).
So the "trademark battles" are likely to continue .
authors:
| Larry Lessig | David Post | Eugene Volokh |
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