Leni,

>Attendance was roughly 80 or so folks, mostly IP legal
>professionals from the informal conversations in the foyer.
Similar sort of attendance at Sydney.

>The question posed by the audience was: "where does one go within
>the .au space to get a domain name corresponding to a trademark?"

>At the end of the session, Ross Wilson called for a show of hands
>on the three whiteboard options:
>1.  .nn.tm.au or .tm.au
>2.  .pr.au
>3.  .com.au rules broadened to include trademark holders.

>On 1, no-one (that I saw) raised their hand.
>On 2, a few people raised their hand.
>On 3, the vast majority of the audience raised their hand.

>It'd be interesting to compare notes with someone that attended the
>Sydney session.

I don't have the actual vote counts for the Sydney session, but my
impression was that they were similar.  However, I have a real
concern that the attendees did not understand the implication of
their voting.

The bulk of the attendees, and a fair part of the discussion, was
from the point of view of protecting intellectual property.  My
impression from the conversations I had was that many of them
supported having trademarks in .com.au because their actual intent
was:

'We want to stop someone else using our Trademark in .com.au',

Of course, .com.au already includes trademarks where they are in use
as company names - but doesn't include them where they are product
names.

But a better mechanism to allay fears of people using 'our' product
trademark in .com.au would be to modify the rules for .com.au so
that it excluded any trademarks on the AIPO database, unless they
were a company name that belonged to the applying entity.

There are some implications to the options put to the meeting that I
don't think were well understood - or even poorly understood :)

For example, there are approximately 5 times as many companies in
Australia as there are registered trademarks.  So if we make .com.au
a home for both company names and product trademarks, its very
likely that a lot of the holders of trademarks will NOT get the name
they hold the trademark for.

And exactly the same would apply to .pr.au - there are a lot more
non-trademarked products than trademarked ones - so in a domain that
combines trademarks with other entities, trademark holders may
frequently miss out on a domain name that matches their existing
trademark.

If there was a .tm.au, then only the 5% of trademarks where there is

































































the same trademark in multiple categories would miss out - and all
the others would have an exact match.

The trademark system (and our language) is built on co-existence.
Kembla Coke and Coal, as well as Coca-Cola Amatil both use the word
Coke for the black stuff they sell (OK boys and girls, no smart
comments here :) ).  Both companies have a right to do so.
McDonalds Plumbing and McDonalds Pharmacy and McDonalds Family
Restaurants all have the right to use the name McDonalds.

I believe the votes represented an attempt at a solution designed to
stop someone else using 'their' name, without understanding that the
solution might significantly reduce an entity's chance of actually
getting the domain name it believed it was entitled to.

Regards, Mark


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*  Message From : HUGHES, MARK          *
*  Location     : AUSTRALIA-CCA HDQ     *
*  KOMAIL ID    : N17503  (CCAMCQN1)    *
*  Date and Time: 12/02/97  15:03:40    *
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