3 ms·

I think this goes a bit broader than just social media. It really has to do with the concept of ownership of words/handles/subdomains on third-party systems. W

I think this goes a bit broader than just social media. It really has to do with the concept of ownership of words/handles/subdomains on third-party systems. Who owns a twitter handle? Who owns an Instagram account handle? Do people with trademarks have a right to their trademark on a third-party system? I work at AWS. Some of our services allow you to customize subdomains (AWS SSO, as an example). There have been customers (typically large enterprises) that assert they should have rights to a specific subdomain within AWS. These subdomains typically relate to their business name or various trademarks. Should these customers have rights to these names? If I'm a small business (or perhaps an individual) and reserve companyxyz.amazonapps.com, should a company have recourse to take that away from me? It's a question that hasn't really been collectively answered within the digital space. And until this question is answered, there are going to continue to be issues.

ethbr0 6y ago
Precisely what I was going to link this to: the early (and now, TLD-expansion) domain name ownership mess. The US (and seemingly other countries) trademark system is woefully underspecified for the modern world. Among other issues: - Enforcement, given an exponential explosion of user-created public content with increasingly sophisticated tools - 1:1 design & physical matter copying - Likeness-intended / indistinguishable deepfakes Trademark skated by on "Would it confuse potential customers?" for decades, but we're at a place where that's no longer sufficiently precise.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  There's also the international issue. Different countries can have conflicting trademarks. So if you've got a valid trademark for "ACME, inc" from the US, and someone else has a valid trademark for "ACME, inc" from the UK, who gets the ACME domain/TLD/subdomain/twitter handle/etc? Both can get legal judgements in their respective countries!
  - Asooka 6y ago
    I'd say if you only own "ACME, Inc" in the US (UK), you only get to register acme.co.us (.co.uk). In this case, when no company owns an international ACME trademark, there should be a body that maintains acme.com as a simple text-only disambiguation page showing you links to each ACME, Inc with a description in the respective country's official language(s). I am nearly certain there is already a discussion buried at the end of some RFC about exactly this problem and proposed solutions, which weren't implemented because the good-enough solution was way cheaper than adding trademark disambiguation to the assigned names system.
  - thw0rted 6y ago
    Forget about international, within a single country you can have identical trademarks in different areas of business [1]. That's why I think we're stuck with first-come, first-served as the only fair way to allocate shared namespaces. I'm pretty sure there was an Apple Ford on the main street in my hometown -- if they get "@apple" first on the next hot social media service, why should anybody be able to take it away from them? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

ethbr0 6y ago

Precisely what I was going to link this to: the early (and now, TLD-expansion) domain name ownership mess. The US (and seemingly other countries) trademark system is woefully underspecified for the modern world. Among other issues: - Enforcement, given an exponential explosion of user-created public content with increasingly sophisticated tools - 1:1 design & physical matter copying - Likeness-intended / indistinguishable deepfakes Trademark skated by on "Would it confuse potential customers?" for decades, but we're at a place where that's no longer sufficiently precise.

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
There's also the international issue. Different countries can have conflicting trademarks. So if you've got a valid trademark for "ACME, inc" from the US, and someone else has a valid trademark for "ACME, inc" from the UK, who gets the ACME domain/TLD/subdomain/twitter handle/etc? Both can get legal judgements in their respective countries!
- Asooka 6y ago
  I'd say if you only own "ACME, Inc" in the US (UK), you only get to register acme.co.us (.co.uk). In this case, when no company owns an international ACME trademark, there should be a body that maintains acme.com as a simple text-only disambiguation page showing you links to each ACME, Inc with a description in the respective country's official language(s). I am nearly certain there is already a discussion buried at the end of some RFC about exactly this problem and proposed solutions, which weren't implemented because the good-enough solution was way cheaper than adding trademark disambiguation to the assigned names system.
- thw0rted 6y ago
  Forget about international, within a single country you can have identical trademarks in different areas of business [1]. That's why I think we're stuck with first-come, first-served as the only fair way to allocate shared namespaces. I'm pretty sure there was an Apple Ford on the main street in my hometown -- if they get "@apple" first on the next hot social media service, why should anybody be able to take it away from them? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer