"Mark Hellmann is senior counsel in the Chicago office of Foley & Lardner. He
specializes in intellectual property law, and also sits on the American Bar Association’s Technology Council. He addressed
many of the issues surrounding trademark law and copyright law, particularly as it relates to the domain naming convention.
In the very early days of the Internet, so-called cybersquatting was effective for a while, such as buying a popular business
name like united.com and waiting for a buyout from companies such as United Airlines or United Van Lines. Now, as the courts
are developing more and more precedents when it comes to Internet law, domain names are effectively seen as extensions of
existing trademark law, using the “reasonable person” test: Would a reasonable individual who types in united.com
be more likely expecting to find the Web site for United Airlines, or United Can Openers? This kind of legal solution is used
when disputes arise over long-held business names.
Hellmann also cautioned that copyright infringement and plagiarism are running rampant
on the Internet, and advised rigorous defense of original copyrighted works to maintain their value as intellectual property
over time. Echoing that concern, other participants of the conference raised examples of automated content-grabbers crawling
their newspaper sites and stripping text and pictures for later illegal resale. Webmasters advised regular monitoring of server
logs to make sure that usage surges can be attributed to legitimate spiders from search engines, and not unscrupulous bots
used by those looking to make a profit off of legitimate original content."
The foregoing is an excerpt from an article entitled: Inland Press Foundation explores
ways to make money online by Hays Goodman Associate Editor
