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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Ownership of Names (was Re: Public identifiers and topic maps)
 At 05:15 PM 9/30/98 -0500, Steven R. Newcomb wrote: >[Even so, in response to what you say, I feel compelled to point out, >perhaps irrelevantly, that names cannot be owned in any meaningful >sense. I own drmacro.com. This ownership is asserted through paying my bill to InterNIC, which acts as both a registrar of ownership (just like when you register the deed to your house at the courthouse) and a manager of access to the names (by controlling the DNS system that maps names to machines). Thus, I own the name space. I can argue that I also own the names within that name space because I also control the machine that has the resources that those names will map to [that's actually not true--Steve owns the machine and I use it only through his largess and kindness, but let's pretend I did own it.]. I can sell names in name space, just as I can sell space on my Web pages (or the roof of my house, which is right in the landing flight path of Austin's airport, and therefore a good candidate for signage that will reach a largely affluent audience--I'll even trim my tree if the price is right :-)). If I can see it, I must own it. Maintaining and protecting ownership is another thing, as you point out. But that's true for anything we can own--that's why we have property laws. If someone else "takes" one of my names by using it in some way that I didn't approve (like registering it and providing a mapping for it that doesn't end up on drmacro.com), I can call the Sheriff and sue them. Xerox may have failed to maintain Xerox, but I know that Coke has succeeded in maintaining Coke as a trade name. So names can be protected given sufficient vigalance and the right breed of attack lawyer. So I maintain my assertion that names, not just name spaces, are ownable things. If this were not the case, Compaq would not have spent 3.something million dollars to buy the name "www.altavista.com". QED. Cheers, E. -- <Address HyTime=bibloc> W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer ISOGEN International Corp. 2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202. 214.953.0004 www.isogen.com </Address> xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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