Re: [Ianaplan] Fwd: [CWG-Stewardship] ICG request concerning IANA trademark and iana.org domain name

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

On 6/22/15 3:36 PM, John R Levine wrote:
>> If we were to put the legal questions aside, I imagine we would all
>> argue that of course the IETF should be able to continue to use the name
>> IANA no matter who the IFO was.  Would you agree with that statement?
>
> Of course.  But it makes no sense to put the legal questions aside. 
> If the future IANA continues to be reasonable, which we all hope and
> expect it will, things will work fine and it doesn't matter who holds
> the trademark and domain.  If things get nasty, it stil doesn't
> matter, we're schrod no matter who holds the trademark and domain.

I still think we should articulate what we think the right approach is
and at least let that be the default.  At the very least this makes
expectations clear.  There is a spectrum of "bad behavior", and a lot of
"bad behavior" can be deterred.  I reject the idea that we can enumerate
all possibilities, which is implied by some of the comments on this
list.  The reason I responded earlier with "take it to the IAOC" is that
we're engineers and not lawyers.  I would expect the IAOC to take the
matter to lawyers.

That doesn't necessarily mean we need to own trademarks, but we need
someone who gets all of this stuff to take the wishes of the community
into account.  That doesn't mean we'll ALWAYS get what we want.  I would
agree with Andrew Sullivan only in as much as sometimes a cost can be
too high, but sometimes the cost is not high at all, and at this moment
in time we still do not have an understanding of that cost.  In other
words, we are uninformed.

Eliot