June 2002

PWC Consulting is changing its name to MONDAY.  If you have a better name, please hit the envelope button to the left and send it in.  Best entry so far: HACKY SACK FRIDAY.

Update: I am not endorsing this parody site, just providing a link to it.

Strange blurb in the National Law Journal.  Givenchy (a sub of LVMH) owns US registrations for GIVENCHY for perfumes and watches.  Time Products alleges it has the rights to import and distribute GIVENCHY waches in the US (presumably from Givenchy’s European watch manufacturer).  Givenchy distributed watches in the US as a giveaway with a purchase of

I have been leaving the reporting of the drama over the re-delegation of the .za TLD (South Africa’s country-code) to Bret Fausett’s ICANN Blog.  However I couldn’t resist mentioning this story that, to prevent a government take-over, the former administrator has hidden the “key” to the domain abroad.  This is shaping up to be

This is the kind of story that gets anti-IP folk riled up about those who “highjack” common terms, but remember, Pat Riley can only enforce the trademark THREEPEAT against people who use it as a trademark, not people like you and me who use THREEPEAT all the time to describe situations where we have won

This STOP decision transferring paint.biz to complainant is another argument for appellate review of UDRPs and other domain name resolution proceedings.  Complainant’s ITU trademark application for PAINT.BIZ was filed after the November ’00 announcement of the .biz TLD was announced.  It apparently does use PAINT.BIZ as a trademark on the real world.  We don’t know

The brand owner’s dream is that if  your brand is ACME, then the consumer can find you at ACME.COM. In otherwords, the brand is the navigator.  In practice, the “dot com assumption” works effectively for only a small number of the world’s brands, but it raises the hopes of any business.

How can navigational systems help