Interview: Icann must clarify gTLD protections
17 February 2012
Eileen McDermott, New York
In an exclusive interview, Russell Pangborn of Microsoft and Time Warner’s Fabricio Vayra reveal their strategies for new gTLDs, discuss the budget implications and explain why more detail is needed on trade mark protection
Eileen McDermott (Managing IP): Are new gTLDs a land mine for trade mark owners?
Russell Pangborn (associate general counsel – trade marks, Microsoft): gTLDs are a dilemma. Past expansions of the DNS look nothing like what they’re proposing, so you don’t have anything to gauge it by. There were seven gTLDs initially, then seven more, then seven more, and then just this last year they added .xxx.
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| Russell Pangborn, Microsoft |
The beauty of that [.xxx] is it’s making a lot of brand owners aware of how expensive it is to do just defensive registrations of your brands in a particular gTLD. Most big brand owners out there didn’t want to have their brands associated with the adult content industry so they wanted to go ahead and block their brands in that particular registry, and people did it pretty broadly from what I’ve heard.
The idea...
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