Category Archives: Law: Trademark Law

It's very hard to tell for sure from the online summary, but it looks as if the the new “Central American Free Trade Agreement ” (CAFTA) has the same nasty domain name and ICANN rules as did the the unlamented IP sections of the FTAA. Here's what the press release says:

State-of-the-Art Protection for U.S. Trademarks
· Requires a system to resolve disputes about trademarks used in Internet domain names, which is important to prevent “cyber-squatting” with respect to high-value domain names.

How do we get Congress to realize the absurdity of making national law subsurvient to a private corporation's whims?

The third draft of the FTAA is now online. The Revised Intellectual Property Chapter, FTAA – ALCA – ZLEA – FTAA Draft Agreement – 2003 – Chapter XX, is still crawling with brackets (meaning there is no agreement), and Art. 13, which I criticized recently, is unchanged — but now it seems the whole chapter may be optional!

Not Geniuses has links to summaries of the overall course of the negotiations. It seems to have gone in the direction of 'FTAA a la carte' — and the IP provisions appear to be among the optional ones.

Of course this means the US will step up its pressure to put IP rules into bilateral trade agreements, but overall this is still progress.

[HTMLized version of document presented to today's conference on Negotiating Intellectual Property Provisions in Free Trade Agreements]

FTAA

Intellectual Property Rights Chapter, Part II, Section 1
Article 13 — Domain names on the Internet

[13.1. Each Party shall participate in the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to promote appropriate country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) administration and delegation practices and appropriate contractual relationships for the administration of the ccTLDs in the Hemisphere. Each Party shall have its domestic Network Information Centers (NICs) participate in the ICANN Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure (UDRP) to address the problem of cyber-piracy of trademarks.]

[13.1. Each Party shall make efforts, to the extent possible, to promote an adequate administration of domain names.]

Summary

The first paragraph is highly objectionable. The second is acceptable, although it is vague.

Nations should not be required to impose the ICANN Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure (UDRP) by law on their citizens because:

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US babies get global brand names. As more and more ordinary words become national and international brands, some overlap between personal name space and TM-space was inevitable. But naming kids “ESPN”? I think naming a child after a brand is a pretty awful thing to do — but that doesn't make it illegal.

I haven’t researched it, but it seems to me that were any owner of even a coined famous mark (the very, very strongest kind) to complain about a child bearing their trademarked name, the company would lose. Mere naming of a child is a non-commercial use of a word, and federal trademark law, at least, requires commercial use of a term for both traditional infringement and for federal dilution claims. Furthermore, the naming is neither dilution nor tarnishment (although it could lead to either in the long run).

The more interesting legal issues arise if the kid ever tries to use his name in commerce. Even people named McDonalds can’t open eponymous burger joints today. So the kid might have more constraints on the use of his name than the rest of us.

Drawing the line isn't easy, since dilution law is fairly hair-trigger, and doesn't require even an imminent likelihood of confusion, must less evidence of actual confusion. Nor does it require that the two sets of goods be in competition — just that the new user be thought to “blur” the uniqueness of the prior user's famous mark.

Now suppose the kid with the funny name grows up and becomes a major recording artist, uses his own name, and sings songs that the famous, coined, mark holder thinks blur or tarnish the brand…. The mark holder would certainly have an arguable case that the former kid should call his act something else.

I think the former kid should win, but it’s a comment on the state of the law that this isn’t as obvious a result as it might be, especially if the dilution claim was based on one of the more aggressive state's laws.

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Here's a fun visual joke from David Weinberg that he calls Trademark Registered Copyright (and which he has placed in the public domain, thereby preventing the hypo from becoming a realo). I suspect that with only a little effort, it could be turned into a nice exam question in Trademark law. Which I'm not teaching this semseter.

What I need is exam questions for Administrative Law and especially International Law, which I'm teaching for the first time.