Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founding fathers of the World Wide Web, has written a short essay entitled “New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful” which argues that, uh, they are.  He singles out .MOBI for criticism.

Some have weighed in already on this essay, here.

Information Holdings Inc. is the parent company of such IP-service companies as TRADEMARK.COM, MICROPATENT, AURIGIN and MASTER DATA.  According to printed reports in the Wall Street Journal, it may be putting itself up for sale.  Thomson, parent of T&T, was identified as a potential bidder.

Google news coverage here, IHI press release here.

Trademark.com (and Trademarks.com) here.

Professor Mark Lemley has written an article entitled : Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property

From the abstract (article available here):

The traditional theory of IP is that the prospect of future reward provides an ex ante incentive to innovate. An increasingly common justification for longer and more powerful IP rights is ex post – that IP will be “managed” most efficiently if control is consolidated in a single owner. This argument is made, for example, in the prospect and rent dissipation literature in patent law, in justifications for expansive rights of publicity, and in defense of the Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Taken to an extreme, this argument justifies perpetual protection with no real exceptions. Those who rely on this theory take the idea of IP as “property” too seriously, and reason that since individual pieces of property are perpetually managed, IP should be too. But IP isn’t just like real property; indeed, it gives IP owners control over what others do with their real property. The ex post justification is strikingly anti-market. We would never say today that the market for paper clips would be “efficiently managed” if put into the hands of a single firm. We rely on competition to do that for us. But that is exactly what the ex post theory would do.

In this paper, I explore the sub rosa development of this ex post theory of IP. I argue that the basis for continued control is the assumption that the value of IP rights will be dissipated if they are used too much. This argument is fundamentally at odds with the public goods nature of information. It stems from a particular sort of myopia about private ordering, in which actions by individual private firms are presumed to be ideal and the traditional role of the market in disciplining errant firms is ignored.

Someone other than the ‘real’ Omarosa (that is to say the Omarosa from that TV show) filed a trademark application for OMAROSA.  Via The Smoking Gun.

A year from now that application should be as valuable as those applications for SHOCK AND AWE.

McDonalds prevails over application for MCDATES, which sought to combine serious dating with restaurant dining.  TTAB rejects application as users might assume MCDATES was source of fast and cheap dating.  Not a close case – applicant used McD’s colors on its website.  Thanks to John for the link.

Some marks that constitute McDonalds’ famous MC formative family include MCMERCHANDISE, MCNATURE, MCGIFT SHOP, MCWIPES, MCSHUTTLE, and here’s one for you irony fans, MCJOBS.

Geico sues Google and Overture over keyword sales.  Via News.com.

Google Geico here.  At the time I did this, at least one of the ads appeared to violate Google’s keyword policy (and didn’t appear to represent fair use).  The ad, for a multi-underwriter broker, ran a headline that read, in its entirety, GEICO, and the landing page was a fill-in form for quotes for numerous underwriters (mentioning Geico only in tiny print towards the bottom).  As such, the headline GEICO does not accurately describe the page’s contents.

ICANN gets antitrust claim dismissed, federal jurisdiction lost, etc.

ICANN budget here.

LexText’s rejoinder to Verisign’s spokesman’s comment that the loss was ‘not that unexpected’: ‘Yeah, that’s it, we meant to lose.’

South African tobacco exec convicted of counterfeiting PETER STUYVESANT cigarettes, via SABC News.