Abstract
In 2001, the World Intellectual Property Organisation identified various points of tension arising from the use of trade marks in the Internet Domain Name System. With the addition of more than 1000 alternatives to .com Top-Level Domain to the global Internet, some of those tensions remain and new tensions are created as trade marks’ function and value in the Domain Name System evolves. This chapter considers the changing use of trade marks in the Domain Name System, in particular from the introduction of new generic Top-Level Domains and their impacts on trade mark rights.
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Notes
- 1.
Reporting a total of 233 ‘contention sets’ of competing applications.
- 2.
‘The motivation is to provide an organization name that is free of undesirable semantics.’
- 3.
The court defined ‘cybersquatting’ as where ‘defendants merely “squat” on their registered domain names until someone else comes along who wishes to use them … usurp[ing] all of the accepted meanings of their domain names, so as to prevent others from using the same domain names in any of their accepted meanings … [a]nd … seek[ing] to make a financial return by exacting a price before consenting to allow others to use the domain names on which they have chosen to “squat”’.
- 4.
‘Advertising one’s own products or services is not a “service” under the Trademark Act.’
- 5.
‘A sizeable number of our team would have preferred status quo with no new gTLDs until better Rights Protection Mechanisms are in place for the existing gTLDs.’
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Forrest, H.A. (2016). The Evolution of Domain Names and Their Impacts on Trade Mark Rights. In: Perry, M. (eds) Global Governance of Intellectual Property in the 21st Century. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31177-7_9
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