The recent ICANN Meeting held in Brussels was marked by heavy attendance and an even heavier issues agenda.
Every ICANN meeting includes a Public Forum in which attendees and other interested parties may direct questions and comments to ICANN’s Board of Directors. ICA Counsel Philip Corwin used his two minutes at the microphone (plus a few additional seconds) to raise three issues of great importance to ICA members and other domain registrants:
1. The need to resist efforts by trademark interests to reopen and make more onerous the rights protections mechanisms associated with new generic top level domains (gTLDs).
2. The strong desirability of initiating a balanced policy review process to consider changes in the UDRP based upon the initial decade of experience, so as to address the legitimate concerns of complainants and registrants while preventing individual UDRP arbitration providers from taking unilateral actions that dilute uniformity and encourage forum shopping.
3. The need for clarification in the Draft Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs as to what constitutes a pattern of IP violations that would disqualify an individual from being associated with an application. This is especially important given the lack of consistency in UDRP decisions relating to similar fact situations, as well as that many UDRP decisions are effectively reversed by out-of-court settlement when a registrant files an appeal.
ICA will be filing formal comments on these and other important matters in the weeks ahead.
The transcript of the Public Forum comments follows—
http://brussels38.icann.org/meetings/brussels2010/transcript-public-forum-24jun10-en.txt
>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:Thank you. Let’s go to Philip Corwin. Philip.
>>PHILIP CORWIN: Good afternoon. Philip Corwin speaking on behalf of
the Professional Domain Investors and Developers of the Internet
Commerce Association.
Three quick points which we will elaborate on in extensive written
comments.
The first is that we would hope that the trademark protections built
into DAG v4, particularly the URS, are left as is. They are the
result of a long and contentious process involving the IRS, the STI,
the GNSO, et cetera.
We recognize that no one is entirely happy with them, but that’s the
nature of compromise.
Having said that and recognizing that rights owners have legitimate
concerns about the cost and time of UDRPs, particularly in regard to
the 70% of default cases, we would encourage ICANN to look seriously,
after ten years of the UDRP, at a considered review and reform of the
UDRP process to assure better uniformity of administration and
consistency of result to give ICANN more graduated enforcement tools
and to assure that the process — the review process is balanced to
take into consideration the concerns of both registrants and
complainants.
Finally, in regard to the background checks, we will be urging more
clarification in regard to the, quote, "pattern of intellectual
property violations" particularly because the present lack of
consistency and predictability of the UDRP. We believe that’s
necessary. For example, while two UDRP violations in a short period
out of a 20-domain name portfolio might mean a lot different than two
violations over a ten-year period for a portfolio of 20,000 names.
We’d also like to know if there’s been an appeal, and if the appeal
was not settled with finality by a court but —
>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Can you bring it to a close, please? You people have to observe the two minutes please. You should see the time clock on there. You shouldn’t really need me to tell you that your time is up.
>> Philip Corwin: I will conclude. It’s hard to look at notes and the clock at the same time. We would urge some clarification of that provision of the background check. Thank you very much.
>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Philip. We will see what we can do.