The New Earth & US, Dot-Coms

I’ve got a story to tell about Carl Sagan, former astronaut and celebrated writer in the United States, who has written and spoken about his life as an astronaut and the planets and stars he has seen from outer space, as no one has ever written and spoken before. He had just been the commencement speaker at the University of Illinois in the summer of 1989 and, flying into Nice, France, for a short vacation, he was cornered by the head of the US delegation to the Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Ambassador Marshall, and invited to be at a dinner the ambassador was hosting. Being a personal friend of Ambassador Marshall, days before the dinner he and I talked about the guest list which he was excited about. He told me that there was one guest who was flying in from Illinois for a short vacation in Nice before proceeding to Paris for a couple of speaking engagements. This was Carl Sagan.

Sagan was seated on my right at the dinner held in one of those small, quaint restaurants in Nice where not only is the cuisine superb but the wine excellent. There were only 18 of us and Sagan was asked to say something, because, as Marshall put it, he was such a great "storyteller of his exploits in outer space." Sagan had nothing to do with the telecom plenipot that the rest of us lesser mortals from good old earth were attending. And enraptured, all 17 of us, over the best mousse chocolat and Kahlua coffee I had ever taken, listened in delight and completely forgot about the "telecommunications gap" that night.

When our host, Ambassador Marshall, who was seated on my left, stood up to toast everyone and introduce Sagan, he mentioned that the latter was born shy but because of astronomy and the years he spent as a masterful astronaut, where, from outer space, one could feel like a prince of the universe, he has been able to overcome his shyness and has become a popular speaker. Sitting beside him throughout the dinner, I noticed that he indeed had a diffident manner about him, not necessarily shy, although one thing was certain, he was not only very interesting but charming as well.

He started by saying that there are billions and trillions of stars in the universe. Having explored dozens of worlds including the moon as well as the planets, he said he had seen magnificent landscapes and gotten an enormous amount of information, but there had never been a hint of anything alive. Human beings have not landed on most of these worlds and yet, there may be something living that the astronauts and science have not been smart enough to detect, but as far as they know, there is no life on any of these worlds. He therefore suggested that there may be dozens of worlds but there may be life on only one of them.

As he looked at the pictures of earth aboard his spacecraft, he saw on the daylit hemisphere a kind of corona, a kind of aura of blue which was beautiful, but that was just the scattering of sunlight off the atmosphere. What was so striking, according to Sagan and other astronauts, is how thin it seemed. Indeed, the thickness of the earth’s atmosphere, compared to the diameter of earth was about the same as the thickness of a coat of shellac on a school globe compared to the diameter of the globe.

And so, after describing so interestingly what he saw astronomically, it was quite natural that he, after a 25-year period of exploring the universe, turned his attention back to earth, this our world, the only one he knows has been graced with life by the Creator. Sagan noted that when we humans started out "a million or two years ago," our numbers were very small, our technological abilities extremely limited. The idea that we might influence, and influence drastically the environment of the planet we depend on, could not have arisen in the most prescient and keenest of our ancestors at the time. But today, and this was in 1989, there are close to six billion of us. Our technology has reached formidable, even awesome proportions. Today we are certainly able to make catastrophic changes in the environment that sustains us, not only on purpose, but also inadvertently and accidentally. As Sagan said this in 1989, he stressed that one can "inflict great harm on ourselves."

He ended by saying that all of us living and breathing on earth will be creating another "semblance of earth’s domain" – the worldwide web, the global information infrastructure (GII). As we all have been given names by which we are called and identified, so are we going to have names in a seamless, borderless domain called the GII. Bear in mind that when Sagan said this, it was 1989. Dr. Pekka Tarjanne, who won his first term as secretary-general of the ITU a few days after the dinner, was one of the guests who enjoyed Sagan’s spiel. He was going to say five years later at the plenipot in Kyoto, Japan where he won a second term that, "Today in 1994, the word ‘internet’ with a small ‘i,’ is on everyone’s lips...five years ago, no one said it."

But Sagan had zeroed in on it and said that each and everyone of the earth’s inhabitants, all of us today, has an individual name; and will be little "dots" in another "semblance of earth’s domain." Sagan was right. All of us on earth have names given by our parents and forebears, or by any means whatsoever, but we do have names that we probably cherish...good names that we protect for which reason there are sanctions imposed on those who besmirch our reputations and blemish our names.

And we are dots in the world of the Internet. My favorites – Kevin Costner and Richard Gere, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow, Sylvester Stallone, Martha Stewart, and Tiger Woods – all found out at one time that their names were used as part of Internet sites without their permission. For US$70 or thereabouts, there are would-be entrepreneurs that regularly register movie stars’ and celebrities’ names then proceed to extort high amounts from them by way of a sell-back. It is not always money that is the motivation for this. The name of Serena Williams was registered by a Los Angeles lawyer to attract visitors to a site promoting his views on racism. As a lure to a pornographic site, unknown to the sexy Sharon Stone, her name was also registered. Not too long ago, a well-known legislator confided to me that her name had in fact been registered as a website by a person she did not know at all. This has been reported to relevant authorities and that was the last I heard of it.

Whatever the reason for what is now called technically as "abusive domain name registration" – whether the reason is blackmail, diversion, money, simple mischief, or any perverted motive – this act is known only by the harmless term "cybersquatting." All those famous brands and trademarks are in danger of having their valuable names spirited away. I think this is particularly true for the MSEs that have acquired some goodwill through the use of certain marks and slogans. You’ve got to protect domain names by securing trademark rights first.

Cybersquatting is being addressed now by the "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers" (ICANN), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the respective congresses of the global telecommunity, but the law somehow is found trailing behind recent technology whether the issue is cloning people or just their names.

A former dormitory mate of mine at New Haven shifted from corporate law practice about three years ago to Internet law, a rapidly growing legal discipline. Felice Reinitz, who’s from Brooklyn, NY, was in Hong Kong for Yale University’s Tercentennial and telephoned me from there. Aside from good memories and a great deal of nostalgia that her phone call evoked, she told me that if, for instance, she were to publish a magazine called the Sharon Stone Magazine and it was pornographic, that would evidently be stopped. In the e-commerce world, it is no different putting it on the Internet. "Of course," Felice said, "the lines are clearer in the paper commerce world, where such misappropriation of names has been litigated for decades."

Most of the time, the person who registers the dot-com name first is entitled to it. There are a lot of similar but valid names in the world and not everyone who registers another name does so with malice. The emergence of the World Wide Web did not repeal a hundred years of trademark law. For that matter, the fact that another has a claim to the same name one has does not prevent the latter from cornering the cybermarket on all domains using that name, as long as you are acting in good faith. Felice Reinitz has given her clients some worthwhile advice: If you register a desired name, the first thing in order is to make certain you get it before anyone else, also be prepared to give it up to somebody if he or she can show a superior right to it, but if you register a name first to which someone else has a lesser or equal claim, it is possible you might be able to sell your right to it at a profit.

Can you imagine a domain name in the US that sold for US$7.5 million ("www.business.com") which had been purchased at US$150,000 only three years earlier? A number of websites, like www. greatdomains.com, are in the business of brokering generic sounding names, although Felice told me that US$500 to US$1,000 is standard for a desirable domain name.

Yes, indeed, Carl Sagan was right. Earth so far is the only planet throbbing with life... that seamless, borderless new earth bubbling with life. Earth’s civilization, earth’s technology has indeed reached formidable, even awesome proportions. Let us not, as Sagan warned, inflict catastrophic changes that can hurt and harm.