On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 06:39:21PM +1000, James Omond wrote:
> I'm sure the big, bad, nasty bank has no problem with legitimate users of
> "ANZ", especially for non-commercial purposes.  I'm sure they don't worry
> about the TM holders of SENATSKANZLEI HAMBURG, SANZYME, FITWEAR SPANZWOOL or
> ZANZIBARS. It's not against those sort of people you have to protect
> yourself.

That wasn't quite what I was suggesting.  As you could see from my examples,
I was talking about:

anz.com
anz.com.au
anz.au.com
anz.co.uk
anz.co.jp
anz.de
anz.biz
anz.bank
anz.bank.com
anz.bank.com.au
anz.bank.au.com
anz.tm
anz.bank.tm
anz.go.to
anz.xu.net
anz.xu

Which of these are worth "defensively registering"?  All of them?
I have a whole bunch more I can create for a small fee...

> So why do they spend all this money?  It's called brand-building, and it's
> how you distinguish yourself from your competitors, especially in a
> commoditised market, such as financial services.  And it's why most
> societies have developed rules (God forbid they should apply to the
> Internet!) to protect the investment which businesses make in their brands,
> and allow them to protect their brands from other businesses who want to
> take the benefit / shine / associated glory / call it what you will, without
> going to to all that trouble and expense.
> 
> It's presumably why your business has gone to the expense of registering
> Xanadu and the flaming-X symbol as trade marks.

Again you misunderstand me.  I am not opposed to trademarks or brands
at all; as you rightly point out, most of the organisations with which
I am involved do indeed have trademarks and/or brands of their own.
However the DNS was not designed with trademark and branding issues in
mind and is not currently being administered in a way that is fair to
all trademark holders and also to those who are not using the Internet
to engage in commerce, shocking though this concept may be to you.

Furthermore, I question the continued value of domain names as brands
beyond the next few years at most.  Due to other shortcomings of the
existing DNS for newer software architectures such as P2P, I expect
the present importance of domain names predicated on their use in URLs
to significantly decline in overall importance.

Cheers,
	Andrew
-- 
mailto:xanni§xanadu.net                         Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/                       Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/                   Technology Manager, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/sc/                   Manager, Serious Cybernetics
P.O. Box 477, Blackburn VIC 3130 Australia	Phone +61 401 258 915