Canadian Trademark Blog

Changes to Whois Services

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that the Whois Task Force has submitted its report to the Generic Name Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council. The GNSO Council will consider the report and deliberate on making a policy recommendation to the ICANN Board.

The Task Force has endorsed a proposal for changing the current Whois to a system with an Operational Point of Contact (OPoC). Under this proposed system, domain name registrants could list third-party contacts on the Whois information. The OPoc would forward communications or inquiries to the domain name owner.

According to a news article, there are still many details to work out and it’s possible that resolution could take months or years. An alternative proposal, requiring domain owners to make personal contact information available unless they can justify a special circumstance, is still being advocated by some stakeholders such as businesses and lawyers.

There is an ICANN meeting scheduled in Lisbon this week and it’s expected that there will be hearings on the proposed changes.

It appears that privacy concerns are trumping tranparency and the new system, if implemented, will make it more difficult to track down domain owners who may be infringing on the rights of trademark owners.

Posted in Domain Name Disputes, Protection & Enforcement | Comments Off

getafirstlife.com Gets a Legal Nod

Friday, March 16th, 2007

We previously reported on the Canadian law regarding parodies of trademarks. Parodies of websites and domain names can be a more complex issue but it seems that some targets actually have a sense of humour.

Recently the website getafirstlife.com, created by Vancouver based blogger Darren Barefoot and parodying the website of the increasingly popular “metaverse” of secondlife.com created by San Franciso based Linden Lab, has been given the go ahead from Linden Lab’s lawyers. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents with its own economy and a currency referred to as Linden Dollars (L$), prompting residents to question the legal status of their virtual currency in the real world.

Getafirstlife.com imitates the look of the website for Second Life’s virtual world and uses a logo that’s a modified version of Second Life’s logo. A link on the getafirstlife.com website invited cease-and-desist letters, the type lawyers often send threatening legal action against website parodists. In response, Linden Lab’s lawyers sent a humorous “permit and proceed” letter claiming “Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody. Linden Lab is well-known for having strict hiring standards, including a requirement for having a sense of humour, from which our lawyers receive no exception.” The letter also grants Barefoot a “nonexclusive, nontransferable, nonsublicenseable, revocable, limited license” to use the modified logo on T-shirts he sells.

Barefoot acknowledged that the “permit and proceed” letter was “of enormous credit to the company”. Second Life have registered 3 million new account holders in the last four months.

Posted in Domain Name Disputes, Protection & Enforcement | 1 Comment »