I agree woth Mr Lees on this...

There are 3 reasons why you may want to have reasons to prevent a party 
having a name of their choice (i.e. have a "policy')

1 - to safeguard the interests of the DNS zone administrator, who may
be called in as a party when the name in question is asserted to be
the property of a third party

2 - to safeguard the interests of a potential third party who may
at some point in the future identify themselves as the rightful
owner of the property of the name

3 - to prevent parties who are applying for names avoid legal litigation
by preventing them access to a name to which they appear to posses
no right of assertion of property.

None of these reasons really stand up - at least thats my reading
of advice I have heard from the relevant folk who deal with trademarks and
intellectual property issues.

In the absense of a policy what can be done?

One method is to use a mandatory public notification period, where an applicant
for a name is publically announced, and other claimants to the name can undertake
appropriate action to prevent the name allocation through due legal process.
In this case there is no damage - the name was never created and therefore the
legal action is not to determine damages, but more focussed on sorting
out which party has the due claim to own the name.

Here I use "own" in an absolute sense. Domain names can and will be traded.
They have value, and they have "owners". Pretty soon (i.e. now) we have
to recognise this and sharpen up our administrative procedures to recognise
reality .

  Geoff


At 11:54 PM 27/12/96, Peter Lees wrote:
>Peter Gerrand wrote:
>
>> Like George Michaelson, I do not support moves to allow open slather on
>> COM.AU  DNs, because this would immediately create a speculative market
>> in broking desirable domain names, which in turn would artificially
>> inflate the costs of acquiring a domain name.  
>
>is it worth looking at what happened when personalised car number
>plates were introduced? 
>
>  - a whole bunch of plates were snapped up for speculation 
>    & are still traded every week
>
>  - the rta (et al) banned a small number of combinations of letters &
>    numbers, since they were displayed in a public place & 
>    could be found offensive
>
>  - everything seems to have settled down ok now, even with only 6 
>    characters to choose from.
>
>my main point is: why not allow speculation? if entity A wants
>computer.com.au badly enough, it should be willing to pay entity
>B who owns it. the domain authority doesn't need to worry about
>_how_ two entities agree who should get the name (or whether there
>is a court case over it). 
>
>all the domain authority should do is press the button that says: 
>"this domain name has this tech contact and this admin contact".
>
>in any case, advertising that domain name is then the problem of
>the owner - if people can't find their business address on the 'net
>- tough. but the entity have the opportunity to create it's own
>identity without having to deal with the mysticism & morality of
>the domain authority. 
>
>yet another 2c worth. i think that brings the whole case to a
>couple of dollars....
>
>cheers  
>
>p
>
>-- 
>Peter Lees  (peter§next.com.au)   -   Technical Manager,   Next Online
>tel: +61 2 9310 1433 *  fax: +61 2 9310 1315  * http://www.next.com.au
>
>"You can have a day off when you're dead, Baldrick, and not before..."