Domain names constitute a valuable key element in electronic commerce. However, some intend to benefit from this fact by registering identical or similar trademarks as domain names, thereby depriving the legitimate owners from obtaining the domain name. This thesis aims to evaluate the protection provided for domain names, by illustrating several models that are under civil, common and international jurisdiction, namely, Jordan, the United Kingdom, the United States and by ICANN. In the first model there are no special regulations. In the second model alternative regulations are applied while, in the third model, a special act is provided; the fourth model constitutes a global protection for specific types of domain name disputes. It is concluded that the absence of a unified legal identity for domain names is the reason why diverse positions are required to protect them; concomitantly, domain name disputes have not been sufficiently addressed, and there is a necessity to provide domain names with a globally comprehensive protection mechanism.

Les conflits entre les noms de domaine et les marques de commerce surgissent essentiellement par manque de coordination entre le système d'enregistrement des noms de domaine et celui des marques. Les marques sont enregistrées par des autorités publiques gouvernementales et les droits qui en découlent ne peuvent s'exercer que sur le territoire du pays d'origine. Le système d'enregistrement des noms de domaine, basé sur la règle "du premier arrivé, premier servi", ne connaît pas de limites géographiques et ignore le principe de spécialité propre aux marques de commerce. L'absence de lien entre ces deux systèmes a permis, l'enregistrement comme noms de domaine par des tiers, de marques de commerce de renom suscitant la confusion quant aux origines des sites. Le nom de domaine constitue un nouveau signe distinctif se situant à la frontière de la régulation technique et du contenu et représente le cadre idéal pour étudier les fondements légitimes de l'intervention du droit dans le cyberespace. En effet, le système des noms de domaine se construit autour de choix et de contraintes techniques dont les concepteurs n'imaginaient pas qu'ils deviendraient la source d'un important contentieux. Les noms de domaine, portes d'accès au réseau, font l'objet d'une tentative de régulation qui concilie les forces contraires de l' ''aterritorialité'' des noms de domaine, avec la "territorialité" des marques de commerce. Cette régulation repose sur la synergie entre l'architecture technique, les normes sociales, l'autoréglementation, le marché et la loi et se présente comme un laboratoire d'idées pour une définition de la régulation de l'Internet. La problématique des noms de domaine et des marques de commerce, constitue une application pratique de cette "corégulation" et amorce ainsi une évolution juridique, facteur de construction du droit sur l'Internet. / Conflicts between domain names and trademarks law, mainly arise from the lack of coordination between their registration processes. The choice and registration of domain names is not subject to any formal regulation and is established on a "first-come first-serve" basis and trademarks are instead subject to a statutory system. Moreover, an important difference between trademarks and domain names is the scope of their reach. Domain names have an instantaneous transnational presence, while trademark law depends on a legislative territory. When a trademark holder wishes to establish himself on the Internet, the holder is sometimes confronted with the fact that someone has already registered a domain name using his own mark. Domain names, as new commercial identifiers, are gateways to web sites and have become one of the most contentious legal issues on the Internet. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to study the legal interactions in cyberspace in order to find solutions on how they should be handled. The Domain Name System (DNS) is an ideal framework to do so. The current controversy over the Internet’s DNS raises important questions about how the Internet should be administered and governed. A Governance, resulting from the synergy between the technical architecture, social norms, self-regulation, contracts and the law, is not unique to cyberspace. However, the conflict between domain names and trademarks c1early shows the need to search for new directions and develop policy cooperation (or regulated self regulation) in order to predict, establish and monitor the rules governing the Internet.

Les conflits entre les noms de domaine et les marques de commerce surgissent essentiellement par manque de coordination entre le système d'enregistrement des noms de domaine et celui des marques. Les marques sont enregistrées par des autorités publiques gouvernementales et les droits qui en découlent ne peuvent s'exercer que sur le territoire du pays d'origine. Le système d'enregistrement des noms de domaine, basé sur la règle "du premier arrivé, premier servi", ne connaît pas de limites géographiques et ignore le principe de spécialité propre aux marques de commerce. L'absence de lien entre ces deux systèmes a permis, l'enregistrement comme noms de domaine par des tiers, de marques de commerce de renom suscitant la confusion quant aux origines des sites. Le nom de domaine constitue un nouveau signe distinctif se situant à la frontière de la régulation technique et du contenu et représente le cadre idéal pour étudier les fondements légitimes de l'intervention du droit dans le cyberespace. En effet, le système des noms de domaine se construit autour de choix et de contraintes techniques dont les concepteurs n'imaginaient pas qu'ils deviendraient la source d'un important contentieux. Les noms de domaine, portes d'accès au réseau, font l'objet d'une tentative de régulation qui concilie les forces contraires de l' ''aterritorialité'' des noms de domaine, avec la "territorialité" des marques de commerce. Cette régulation repose sur la synergie entre l'architecture technique, les normes sociales, l'autoréglementation, le marché et la loi et se présente comme un laboratoire d'idées pour une définition de la régulation de l'Internet. La problématique des noms de domaine et des marques de commerce, constitue une application pratique de cette "corégulation" et amorce ainsi une évolution juridique, facteur de construction du droit sur l'Internet. / Conflicts between domain names and trademarks law, mainly arise from the lack of coordination between their registration processes. The choice and registration of domain names is not subject to any formal regulation and is established on a "first-come first-serve" basis and trademarks are instead subject to a statutory system. Moreover, an important difference between trademarks and domain names is the scope of their reach. Domain names have an instantaneous transnational presence, while trademark law depends on a legislative territory. When a trademark holder wishes to establish himself on the Internet, the holder is sometimes confronted with the fact that someone has already registered a domain name using his own mark. Domain names, as new commercial identifiers, are gateways to web sites and have become one of the most contentious legal issues on the Internet. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to study the legal interactions in cyberspace in order to find solutions on how they should be handled. The Domain Name System (DNS) is an ideal framework to do so. The current controversy over the Internet’s DNS raises important questions about how the Internet should be administered and governed. A Governance, resulting from the synergy between the technical architecture, social norms, self-regulation, contracts and the law, is not unique to cyberspace. However, the conflict between domain names and trademarks c1early shows the need to search for new directions and develop policy cooperation (or regulated self regulation) in order to predict, establish and monitor the rules governing the Internet.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is perhaps one of the most widely used infrastructural software entities in the world. Built in a distributed manner. DNS can be simply explained as a mapping tool between human readable addresses and physical addresses. Ultimately. it acts much like a phone book. providing a means of associating a high-level understanding with a low-level representation. However, the primary goal that motivated the design and implementation of such a mapping device was solely performance. The creators of DNS mainly focused on getting technical details right, leaving gaps for today's security and availability threats which were nonexistent at that time. As a result. DNS provides an insecure and unreliable mapping mechanism in today's environment that neither performs any checks on the origin of data, nor provides a solution better then simple replication in the face of benign or malicious server failures. After the emergence of threats like man-in-the-middle attacks, distributed denial of service attacks, and server overloads, alarms have been sounding in the systems community for a renovation of DNS. This need has given birth to several proposals to improve the security and availability in DNS. DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant Secure DNS (SBFTSDNS), Cooperative DNS (CoDoNS), and Cooperative DNS Lookup System (CoDNS) are some of the most important steps taken to fix the current problems in DNS. This thesis overviews these proposals for renovation in addition to a recent proposal based on cooperation between domain name servers, called ConfiDNS [1]. ConfiDNS does not dictate any change to the current setting of DNS; instead it intercepts name resolution activity between a client and a domain name server, and performs multiple simultaneous name lookup queries to multiple name servers in order to produce results (Internet Protocol Addresses) that are agreed upon by a pool of name servers. Further, the agreed results are stored for a history mechanism to operate on, in order to create direct paths to the source of content, and bypass problematic name servers during server failures. The key to availability on the client-side of DNS is the cooperative approach. which extends the classic primary-secondary replication scheme to a pool of name servers. The primary statistics on the collected domain name resolution data show that for approximately 95% of the domain names this idea is applicable, while for the rest, which are mostly domain names served by content distribution networks, is not realistic due to the number and frequent variation of physical addresses

Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Abraham Drassinower.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-215). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

The Domain Name System (DNS), a name resolution protocol is one of the vulnerable network protocols that has been subjected to many security attacks such as cache poisoning, denial of service and the 'Kaminsky' spoofing attack. When DNS was designed, security was not incorporated into its design. The DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) provides security to the name resolution process by using public key cryptosystems. Although DNSSEC has backward compatibility with unsecured zones, it only offers security to clients when communicating with security aware zones. Widespread deployment of DNSSEC is therefore necessary to secure the name resolution process and provide security to the Internet. Only a few Top Level Domains (TLD's) have deployed DNSSEC, this inherently makes it difficult for their sub-domains to implement the security extensions to the DNS. This study analyses mechanisms that can be used by domains in islands of security to deploy DNSSEC so that the name resolution process can be secured in two specific cases where either the TLD is not signed or the domain registrar is not able to support signed domains. The DNS client side mechanisms evaluated in this study include web browser plug-ins, local validating resolvers and domain look-aside validation. The results of the study show that web browser plug-ins cannot work on their own without local validating resolvers. The web browser validators, however, proved to be useful in indicating to the user whether a domain has been validated or not. Local resolvers present a more secure option for Internet users who cannot trust the communication channel between their stub resolvers and remote name servers. However, they do not provide a way of showing the user whether a domain name has been correctly validated or not. Based on the results of the tests conducted, it is recommended that local validators be used with browser validators for visibility and improved security. On the DNS server side, Domain Look-aside Validation (DLV) presents a viable alternative for organizations in islands of security like most countries in Africa where only two country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) have deployed DNSSEC. This research recommends use of DLV by corporates to provide DNS security to both internal and external users accessing their web based services. / LaTeX with hyperref package / pdfTeX-1.40.10

Domain names in the Czech legal system The aim of this work is to introduce readers to the topic of domain names themselves with a necessary technical overlap, their legal regulation in the Czech legal framework, including a general analysis of particular legal institutes used for their protection (namely trademarks, unfair competition, name of an individual and name of a legal entity), and finally to outline the ways and development of the settlement of disputes arising from them before the judicial and extrajudicial bodies. The first chapter of the thesis covers the concept of domain names as such from a technical point of view. There is described the domain name function in the Internet and the domain name system as well, consisting of top level domains of different types with their specifics. Consequently are there through domain name registration covered domain name disputes in a global context, including the individual causes (types) of these disputes, and finally concludes with the description of a specific form of alternative dispute resolution called UDRP. The second, most extensive chapter is dedicated to the legal regulation of domain names in the Czech legal framework itself. The chapter begins with theoretical concept of domain names from the legal point of view and its historical...

The conflict between trade marks and domain names has been a major subject of legal debate over the past few years. The issues arising from the relationship between trade marks and domain names reveal the difficulties associated with attempts to establish mechanisms to address the problems existing between them. Trade mark laws have been adopted to resolve the trade mark and domain name conflict, resulting in more conflict. Domain name registers have to date been constructed on the basis of first come first served. Given that the generic indicators are very general, it has been inevitable that problems would arise, particularly once the commercial potential of the Internet began to be realised. Unlike domain names, trade marks are protected in ways which are more precise. Trade marks may not be imitated either exactly or in a manner so similar that it is likely to confuse a significant portion of the public. It is possible for more than one enterprise to use the same trade mark in respect of different goods, although this is not possible with domain names. This disparity in objectives leads to two core problems. The first problem relates to cybersquatters who deliberately secure Top Level Domains (TLDs) containing the names or marks of well known enterprises in order to sell them later. The second problem relates to the rival claims between parties who have genuine reasons for wanting particular TLDs, and problems associated with the resolution of such claims. The disputes between parties with legitimate conflicting interests in domain names are often not equitably and effectively resolved, thus compromising the rights of domain name holders. There is great activity in the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) to provide a more substantial system of governing and regulating the Internet. There is a strong movement to provide methods of arbitrating conflicts between honest claims to TLDs which conflict either in Internet terms or in trade mark law. However, these difficult policies remain to be settled. South Africa's progress towards the establishment of an effective mechanism to govern and regulate the Internet has been hindered by the absence of a policy to resolve domain related trade mark disputes. South Africa only recently drafted the South African Regulations for Alternative Domain Name Dispute Resolution (zaADRR), although the regulations have not yet been adopted. Therefore South African parties to domain name disputes continue to find solutions to their problems through the court system or foreign dispute resolution policies. The purpose of this study is firstly to examine and to comment on the basic issues of trade mark law and domain names in this area, with particular reference to South Africa, and secondly to examine the mechanisms in place for the resolution of trade mark and domain name disputes and to highlight the issues that flow from that. An additional purpose of this study is to discuss the policies of the dispute resolution mechanisms and to suggest how these policies can be improved.

Protection of Domain Names (master's degree thesis) The purpose of my thesis is to analyse a legal interpretation of the domain name. The thesis analyzes the theoretical base of this term, authorities competent to constitute rules on the market of domain names and to decide how to judge corelated disputes, attention is also drawn to the conflict of protected names and domain names. The important question to be answered is the eventual social significance of a juridical framework of domain name. The question of domain names (and also other institutes connected with internet) is a widely discussed and disputed topic. The last three decades the rules and the execution of them were constantly developing and underwent major changes. Therefore it's very interesting to watch this progress and to compare the many different points of view on the whole issue. Those were the main reasons for my research. The thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter One, Two and Three are introductory, they define the term 'domain name', its function and structure. They also express and explain the basic terminology attached to domain names. Chapter Four analyzes the place of the domain name in Czech law system. This chapter is divided into two parts. Part One is focussing on the previous private law codex. The Second Part...