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Amazon.com send a letter to ICANN on the 10th of January 2014 as a follow up to the letter from the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for Peru. The letter was regarding the Amazon.com pending gTLD application for .AMAZON and the IDN equivalents.
Amazon.com said that the Applicant GuideBook specifically requires an exact match to name listed in the ISO 3166-2 standard. “Amazon is not an exact march with Amazonas” they said. And they also said that Amazon is not a country, territory or capital city name that are protected in any language but it falls in the “county, province or state” category that only provides exact match protection.
Amazonas is Portuguese for Amazon. Amazon.com tries to convince ICANN that just because Amazon is shared between several countries it is not a territory but a province of each country. Amazon is certainly not a “county, province or state” so it must be a territory. There is not other way to see this.
Then Amazon.com tried to distort a recent decision of the Peruvian Trademark Office that found no similarities between a third party mark AMAZONAS and the AMAZON mark: “since the denomination AMAZONAS makes reference to one of the regions located north of Peru, while the denomination AMAZON will be perceived by the average consumer as a fanciful sign.”
Amazon.com failed to say that AMAZON is perceived by the average PERUVIAN consumer as a fanciful sign because people in Peru don’t speak English and they don’t refer to the Amazon territory as Amazon in their everyday life. They speak Spanish where Amazon is Amazona. And although Portuguese and Spanish have many differences, they are closely related.
Furthermore the trademark office decision is on trademarks not new gTLDs. There is no translation in trademarks where in the Applicant GuideBook of new gTLDs, translations play a big part.
Amazon.com should just accept it and save some embarrassment. It’s .AMAZON new gTLD application is dead in the Amazon water.
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The common practice of registering names without enough distinctiveness has to be stopped. Kudos to brazilian government (and maybe someone else at last) that is the only government in the world, with the exception of India’s governement, able to stand up against corporations.
Trademarks like iPhone, green and yellow of John Deere, 46 of Valentino Rossi and many many others have not enough distinctiveness in the sectors in which they was registered. Period.
The bad practice of using the principle of acquired distinctiveness to register signs with no distinctive power have to be stopped.
So compliments, congratulations, maximun respect to Brazilian Government.
P.S. It is really sad seeing intellectual property experts arguing in favour of companies that use i.p. rights in bad faith.
It is too much simple to go with common names and want strong trademarks… Or, even worst, go with deceptive names, names commonly in use and something similar. Deceptive is not the case of Amazon, that is the case of iPhone; 46 in Nice classes 18 or 25 for instance; John Deere’s yellow+green in agriculture business etc. For amazon there is only a problem regarding a mark identical to a common name, and the common name used for centuries have to prevail. I repeat, this is the risk of choosing a well established common name, in use for decades or more, as your own trademark. On the other hand THEY HAVE ALREADY TAKEN a great advantage from the entire aura, the entire world of significances, senses, meanings, suggestions…bring to them from that incredible and unique region of our world. THEY HAVE ALREADY TAKEN.
P.S. Of course the previous PS was not targeted to you, Konstantinos.
You are Tooooootally on the wrong side of the argument. Amazon is going to wind up getting their .AMAZON tld. They are going to push back on the GAC advice. No question.
I am against the .amazon new gTLD. Am I wrong? For you maybe.
Some people think that the future of new gTLDs depends on the .amazon application. I don’t.
“You are Tooooootally on the wrong side of the argument. Amazon is going to wind up getting their .AMAZON tld. They are going to push back on the GAC advice. No question.”
Of course, even Apple was able to STEAL a name like iPhone to all peolple on the world only using in bad faith the principle of secondary meaning. It was 1998 or even before that all registrars suggeted to put the “i” or the “e” in front of a word when you checked the whois to register a new domain. Since internet was born an “i” placed in front of a common word indicates something that interacts with internet…
No matter, smart people already hate those beasts
Anyway amazon will die, like google. People have already understood that those companies have become extremely harmful and dangeous beasts to which is time to cut the heads as others wrote before me