According to news reports, the logo of the 7-Eleven convenience chain was used as a domain name by an individual and the information on the site was accessed by hyper-link. The suspect was caught and charged by the Criminal Investi-gation Bureau for violating the Trademark and Fair Trade Laws.
After visiting the website myself, however, I discovered the information was not connected through hyper-link, as reports had said; the suspect actually copied everything on the company's website, including the front page and all other pages, without altering a single detail. That's why the company name or the email address of the suspect couldn't be tracked down.
Duplicating 7-Eleven ads, by showing, hanging, or distributing them in a residence, may violate the Copyright Law but doesn't break either the Trademark or the Fair Trade Laws.
However, it's the motive of the suspect in this case and similar cases that matters and should be throughly investigated.
The 7-Eleven website has a box for member applications. But when surfers send in their personal information when applying for membership, they might send it to the "fake" 7-Eleven.
If a person hides codes to intercept such information, the suspect may not only be infringing the Copyright Law, but also be involved in fraud, tapping electro-magnetic records and stealing telecommunication secrets, all of which seriously endanger Web security.
As for domain names and registration of trademarks, many of the official departments around the world that are responsible for trademark regulation have spent a lot of time and money reviewing the registration issue; quasi-standards of evaluation have been estab-lished. Nevertheless, these standards are not objective and different cases have to be decided based on their merits. Many disputes have therefore arisen.
According to court rulings, Tung Yi (2?@) and Tong Erh (2?G), and "KOK" and "KOKA," are not similiar trademarks. However,"Li Hou Kung" (?O3黿d) and "Kung Li" (康?O), "PROFENID" and "PRONID," and "MINITEC" and "TEC" have been found to be similar trademarks.
The organization responsible for domain name registration in Taiwan is the Taiwan Network Information Center, a civilian foundation without government authority. As a result, the quasi-standards applied in Trademark Law are not appropriate in reviewing domain names.
A trademark represents the products and services that a corporation provides. Although a domain name seems like a company name, it is actually a counterpart of an IP address, serving the function of a street address in the real world. As a result, it doesn't constitute the prerequisite required for the application of the Trademark Law.
To reach a website, an internet user has to type an IP address on a browser, which is a string of numbers just like a telephone number; domain names in English just make it easier for people to remember them.
The most efficient way to wipe out cyber-squatters is not to follow the approach adopted by the US. Instead, we can either cancel the English domain name registration or review the registration of company names.
In other words, if people apply with company names, the names of companies should be taken as their domain names (Tung Yi or the English spelling, for example). If there is more than one Tung Yi company, name them Tung Yi 1, Tung Yi 2 and so on. By doing so, the trouble caused by cyber-squatters will be prevented.
This also complies with the idea that a domain name is supposed to be a company name rather than being used as a trademark.
Weng Tzu-te is a chief executive of Tien-Li Intellectual Property Rights Office.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS