A poster to Slashdot describes a trademark dispute over link names as trademarks. The poster licensed a domain name and began a weblog at the domain's URL. A link farmer is threatening legal action because they own (but don't actually use) a domain with a similar name. While several responders at Slashdot point out that "trademark" supposedly protects, well, trades, the case is interesting because it highlights one of the ways that the Web is collapsing the space of commerce: Within top-level domains like the .com space, every website is equally unique and important. In pre-Web commerce each trade occupied a relatively well-defined space: Gibson Guitars was distinct from Gibson Exhaust Systems. Farther back, geographic spaces helped maintain linguistic distance between names (what the phrase "the school" or "the baptist church" meant depended on what village or community one was in).

In global information spaces, those distinctions begin to collapse. Not merely at the trade level (where two geographically distinct businesses with the same name suddenly have to contest the same name in virtual space), but even entities that are both geographically and topically dispersed: See Uzi Nissan (owner of Nissan Computers) on the dispute with Nissan Motor over the domain name nissan.com. And there's Wikipedia's ubiquitous disambiguation pages.

As information becomes capital and words become real estate, expect to see more of these sorts of battles.

[via Slashdot: Your Rights Online]