RE: Thoughts on URL scheme registration and trademarks

Martin, thanks for your thoughts.  I have a couple of responses to
particular points:

Regarding "two different protocols with the same acronym", that's the
problem we're trying to solve.  Even if someone doesn't end up shipping
a product using a new URL scheme name, they can make known their intent
to use that name, by registering it.  I think we need to make it clear
that registration does NOT imply 'ownership'.  And, BTW, the PhD student
should also be able to perform this registration, if she gets there
first; we need to be sure that the 'use it or lose it' guidelines are
liberal enough that such usage can be accomodated.  

The 'private scheme' problem, e.g. aol:, exists -- it's very hard to
say, "they shouldn't do that" when they already have.  :-)  There is
still benefit to a vendor with a 'private' URL scheme to have a place to
make the usage known.  As was raised in the meeting in Memphis, AOL has
caused themselves some headaches with this usage: a subscriber goes to a
friend's home and wants to show him something neat, and types
"aol:blahblah" into the friend's Internet Explorer browser which
connects through an ISP -- surprise!  But that doesn't stop them from
using it.  

Your distinction between the domain name problem and URL scheme names is
well taken, and in major part I personally agree with you.  My concern
is that there will be those who will NOT agree or understand, and IANA
will end up spending money on lawyers.  I'd like to see us craft this
process in a manner that minimizes that possibility.  
> --------------------------------
> A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original
> dimensions.
Ian King, QA Lead <[email protected]>
Microsoft Information Retrieval -- Internet Servers Business Unit


> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Martin J. Duerst 
> Sent:	Friday, May 30, 1997 8:21 AM
> To:	Ian King
> Cc:	[email protected]; Rich Petke
> Subject:	Re: Thoughts on URL scheme registration and trademarks
> 
> On Thu, 29 May 1997, Ian King wrote:
> 
> > In Memphis, we touched briefly on the subject of trademarks in URL
> > scheme names.  I've given this some thought, and the following is an
> > analysis of issues as I see them, combined with some suggestions.
> 
> Thanks for the many interesting thoughts. Here is some alternative,
> maybe provocative, position. I'm not a lawyer, my thoughts are just
> based on (European, maybe not US :-) common sense and whatever tidbits
> I think I know about trademark law.
> 
> People are concerned about trademarks because of the problems
> with domain names. Why are there problems with domain names?
> Because domain names are (among else) a form of company names,
> a way to identify a company. If I own company foo, I'm worried
> about somebody else taking www.foo.com because my customers
> might be confused, detracted, or deceived, the other guy may
> benefit from the name recognition I have invested in, and I
> may have to invest again to gett www.foo2.com recognized by
> my (potential) customers. Trademark law has been written for
> such cases; the main thing it currently can't cope with when
> it comes to domain names is that all domain names are globally
> visible, whereas most company names have only local visibility
> and are restricted to a certain kind of business.
> 
> Now URL scheme names are completely different in this respect.
> URL scheme names identify protocols, access modalities, the
> syntax of what follows after the scheme name, and so on.
> This is extremely helpful, because it strongly restricts the
> business category. Let's say there would be a company called
> "First Tools Production", with a well established trademark
> "ftp". Could they challenge the use of "ftp:" in the ftp URL?
> No, because the tool production company name "ftp" and the
> computer protocol name "ftp" can nicely live together. So the
> URL trademark problem is a lot smaller than the domain name
> trademark problem.
> 
> But I think we can even go one step further. There definitely
> are protocols that have been trademarked. I guess nfs would
> be a nice example. The nfs specialists at Sun currently work
> on an nfs: URL, but let's assume for a moment that they wouldn't,
> and somebody else would. Would that be an infringement of
> trademark law? Probably not, because unless the URL definition
> is really weird, whenever "nfs:" would be used it would
> denote nothing else than nfs. Now this is definitely not something
> prohibited by trademark law. Everybody is permitted to use
> trademarked names to speak about the companies and products
> these trademarks denote. Even including a trademark in a book
> title is no problem at all, as you will easily see when you
> think about computer publications. The only requirement in such
> a case is that you mention the trademark ownership, but that
> appears in fine print only. In newspapers, it rarely appears,
> at least here in Europe; I guess in the US, newspapers might
> add a TM mark more frequently. It is clear from the functionality
> of URLs that we can't add a TM sign to the scheme part.
> Having a sentence such as "due to the nature and use of URLs,
> the absence of a TM sign on an URL does not mean that it
> does not contain any trademarks" may be the only thing
> necessary in our specs. Last, if you say something insulting
> about a company or product, there may be other laws that allow
> to sue you, but trademark law is not concerned. And it would
> be difficult to construct an insult with an URL.
> 
> We of course have the problem that two different protocols
> might end up with the same acronym. Assume a company
> trademarks a protocol name, but then never markets it.
> A PhD student invents something else, but with a different
> name, and gets it used in the Internet. In this case,
> it won't be the use of this abbreviation in the URL that
> will cause IETF, IANA, or whoever is responsible, legal
> problems. It will be the use of this abbreviation for
> the protocol itself.
> 
> The case of examples such as "aol:" is something that should
> be solved on a different level than trademark law. If AOL
> is just a network service (and content) provider, they do
> not have a need for an URL. They can use http://www.aol.net
> or whatever appropriate, like everything else. If they
> indeed have a specific protocol, they should use the name
> of that protocol, which most probably won't be "aol", for
> the URL.
> 
> Whereas I therefore think that trademark issues are really
> a minor problem for URLs. Unfortunately, this doesn't apply
> for URNs, where all kinds of companies will be interested
> to use their proprietary namespaces with acronyms that they
> may up to now only have used with a very restricted audience,
> but which now suddenly have to be worldwide unique.
> 
> 
> Regards,	Martin.