Ownership of Names (was Re: Public identifiers and topic maps)

[W. Eliot Kimber]

At 10:52 AM 9/29/98 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
>
>>Eliot owns drmacro.com at 00:00:01 GMT 28 September 1998
>>(and for a while before and after).
>>
>To be a little more precise, he owns the internet domain
>name drmacro.com. He doesn't necessarily own the UK trade
>mark drmacro.com, or the Spanish vehicle registration plate
>drmacro.com, etc...

I think that to be most accurate, I must say that I have some set of
property rights in the Internet domain name "drmacro.com".  Because it is
leased or rented to me, I don't own it in the strict legal sense (to the
degree that I understand that, which is basically to the degree my wife (an
ex attorney) explained it to me while we were walking the dog).

Of course I don't own the string "drmacro.com" in all possible contexts,
any more than the Coca Cola company owns the string "Coke" in all possible
contexts (as much as it might want to).

[Domain names have the interesting effect of flattening or unifying what is
otherwise a set of more or less distinct name spaces, namely trade names
used for particular types of product.  If domain names reflected the
different trademark name spaces, you'd have domains like
"coke.softdrinks.com" and "coke.steelmills.com".]

Cheers,

E.
--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>

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