These comments are personal, and do not necessarily reflect those of Eric Menge, our official spokesperson for the Office of Advocacy. If you want to just use the group as a sounding board for ideas from the ether, then, yes, you'll get a lot of criticism of those ideas. I've got some great ideas. For example, I'd like to see a cyber-cemetary where the dearly departed would be memorialized in web pages that they could design in conjunction with a funeral director, or which the family of the deceased could have put up. Rather than to market to the public directly, I think an appropriate business model would be to market the service to funeral directors, who could then retail it as a value-added service.
Famous marks are, by at least one legal definition, distinctive and exclusive.
Hence, some kind of carve-out is possible, if there were an objective means of filtering the millions of other marks to identify the famous ones. I also don't seem to understand why we shouldn't include obscene and offensive words, as well as racially or sexually charged words for consideration, as long as we are expanding the discussion from famous marks to whatever else someone might be upset about. The UDRP is believed to be working marvelously well for those using it. Heck, I've had two domain name owners transfer their domain names to my clients before the UDRP proceedings even got to a decision, because they wanted to avoid a bad faith determination. Non-famous trademarks include a heck of a lot of common surnames, geographical place names, and common English words.