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Monday, June 10, 2002 |
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Brand As Navigator
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The brand owner's dream is that if your brand is ACME, then the consumer can find you at ACME.COM. In otherwords, the brand is the navigator. In practice, the "dot com assumption" works effectively for only a small number of the world's brands, but it raises the hopes of any business.
How can navigational systems help the Internet mirror the ability of the real world to allow coexistence of identical marks in different geographic locations and different goods or services? Unrestricted gTLDs provide no context when used as a search tool, and therefore cause consumer confusion and create the potential for cybersquatting. Keyword functionality (common name resolution) should probably be an Internet standard built into browsers, and not something MSFT or Keith Teare or a private company should own. Pay-per-view search engines are not really navigational aids .
Google on the other hand, if it can develop functionality like this geographic-based search, may be a contender in the holy grail of brand navigation, where what you search for is what you get.
11:25:00 PM 
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World Wide Direct Line
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I thought link-blocking software was going to make these disputes go away, but the Danish newspaper guild is one of several entities accusing linkers of trademark infringement (and, more plausibly, unfair competition). In 1998 I wrote a paper entitled "Dismantling the Web With Trademark and Copyright Law." The hypothesis was that the Web was anti-thetical to everything media needed to maintian status quo. Encouraging linking was like encouraging channel-changing, and had to be removed (or seriously limited). Will the Web look more and mpore like cable tv?
Question for discussion: if link-blocking software is readily available and a website doesn't employ it, does that imply a license to link?
10:55:34 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Martin Schwimmer.
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