James Gleick has a long article in the New York Times Magazine on the collision of names in an increasingly borderless world.
The world is running out of names. The roster of possible names seems almost infinite, but the demand is even greater. With the rise of instantaneous communication, business spreading across the globe and the Internet annihilating geography, conflict is rampant in this realm of language and of intellectual property. Rules are up for grabs. Laws regarding names have never been in such disarray. . . .
Computer science offers a useful term of art: namespace -- a territory within which all names are distinct and unique; no fuzziness allowed. The world has long had namespaces based on geography and other namespaces based on economic niche. . . . But traditional namespaces are overlapping and melting together.
Gleick zips through several topics, including the difficulty of coming up with new names and the muddle that is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and its treatment of the Internet. His real point, however, is that all this hullabaloo about ownership of names may be misguided:
To cope with the dynamic, entangled, variegated nature of our information-governed world, perhaps the law just needs to relax -- loosen the cords, instead of tightening them. A system based on property rights in names may be the wrong approach. The principle people really care about is authenticity and truthfulness. The law needs to prevent miscreants from pretending to be people they're not or from passing off spurious products -- but that is all. . . . Namespaces will collide. Let them.
Of course, it is precisely this simple line--preventing people from being misled--that has led to a lot of today's tangled case law. If you really want a simple line (rather than, say, one that is necessarily effective), why not let the market and increasingly available news sources take care of name confusion?