Harassment (was Re: ELAN.NET ...)

Mon Nov 3 18:08:56 UTC 2003

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine wrote:

[Regarding somebody's registration of nanog.us]

> I can't tell you who to talk to over at NS, but since you all have latest
> bind, and are cluefull on the VGRS wildcard hack, you all can limit the
> effect that the "nanog" has in the .us root zone.

Uh... This appears to be a potential trademark law issue, except that I'm
not aware of Merit or anybody else ever claiming NANOG as a trademark.
Presumably, if this becomes a problem (somebody advertising alternate
"NANOG" conferences, for example), Merit's lawyers can deal with it.  This
certainly isn't an operational issue, unless the word NANOG, independent
of context, is somehow of critical operational importance.

I suppose this is the slippery slope that's opened up when people start
blocking wildcards they don't like in their individual DNS servers, but as
one of those who was concerned about the effect on DNS consistency that
would have, I shudder to think what would happen if individual DNS
operators started doing trademark enforcement.

-Steve