On Jun 17, 2011, at 8:39 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Owen DeLong" <owen@delong.com>
MacDonald's would likely get title to .macdonalds under the new rules, right?
Well... Which MacDonald's?
1. The fast food chain 2. O.C. MacDonald's Plumbing Supply 3. MacDonald and Sons Paving Systems 4. MacDonald and Madison Supply Company 5. etc.
All of them have legitimate non-conflicting trademarks on the name MacDonald's (or at least could, I admit I made some of them up). I said when this mess first started that mapping trademarks to DNS would only lead to dysfunction. It did. Now the dysfunction is becoming all-encompassing. It will be interesting to watch the worlds IP lawyers (IP as in Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol) eat their young over these issues for the next several decades.
Indeed.
It's actually "McDonalds", of course, and the US trademark law system has a provision for "famous" marks. I don't recall what the rules are, but once they've decide your mark is "famous", then it no longer competes only in its own line-of-business category; *no one* can register a new mark in any category using your word.
While that is true, there are several McDonalds registered in various spaces that actually predate even the existance of Mr. Crok's famous burger joints.
Coca-Cola, Sony, and I think Kodak, are the canonical examples of a famous mark.
Let us not also forget the over-extension of that situation, as applied to Jell-O where there are now very bizarre rules about who can and can't refer to just any gelatine dessert as Jell-O. Owen