Ben Edelman of Harvard has become the Charles Kuralt of the Domain Name world, releasing offbeat reports on strange happenings.  Check out his report on intentional whois fraud at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/invalid-whois/?d., as well as abuse of “dropped names” at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/renewals/   This one on a possible lawyer/squatter exploiting the new .biz names is particularly disturbing:…

The Second Land Rush will begin soon for.info domain names.   Some of these names were the subject of fraudulent sunrise applications.  Others were challenged by Afilias because the applicant had made fatal errors on its application – for example, applying to register ACMESYSTEM.INFO when the underlying trademark registration was for ACME SYSTEMS.  More info at…

The 1-888-MATTRES case, In re DIAL-A-Mattress, 244 F.3d 88 (Fed. Cir. 2001) suggests that domain names in the form [DESCRIPTIVE TERM].COM or [GENERIC TERM].COM are registrable as trademarks (at least in the U.S.), but what scope of protection should they be accorded?  A hint that the answer is “not much” is a WIPO decision…

Check out www.schwimmerlegal.com for free international trademark meta-searching and the famous Ping Whois.

I’d like to thank Nathan Hoover and Bret Fausett for their help in setting up the Trademark Blog.