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WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization. It administers international intellectual property treaties (such as the WIPO copyright treaty and the Trademark Law Treaty of 1994).

ICANN has given WIPO the authority to arbitrate domain name disputes. ICANN-accredited registrars have to agree to WIPO arbitration; if you register a domain (under ICANN policy), you generally agree to WIPO jurisdiction.

More info is at http://www.wipo.org/about-wipo/en/index.html?wipo_ content_frame=/about-wipo/en/gib. htm and at http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains /gu ide/index.html

You want to see who they are?
You want to contact them?

http://arbiter.wipo.int/contact/index .ht ml

cheers,
.j

The full text of the WIPO decision can be found at http://arbiter.wi po. int/domains/decisions/html/d2000-0848.html. If you read this decision you can find an interesting piece of news: Altavista requested a blanket order forcing the domain name registrar used by Grandtotalfinances to hand over any similiar misspellings to AltaVista. The presiding WIPO panelist thankfully turned down that request -- while Grandtotalfinances acted in bad faith other "typo" sites MAY not have acted in bad faith.

Imagine that--WIPO not immediately finding that people are acting in bad faith: At least its a start.

Some days it really pisses me off that there's no "misinformative" option in moderating.

If you are aware of such a treaty, feel free and provide such a citation. If you heard this from your mother's friend's sister's secretary, do a little fact-checking first.

There is a World Intellectual Property Organization which does accept patent applications. However, it does not grant worldwide patents. It merely expedites applying for patents in several countries (or regional organizations, see below), but it's still up to each individual country (or regional organization) whether or not to grant the patent.

There are three regional organizations I know of which grant patents which are applicable across multiple countries: the European Patent Office, the African Regional Industrial Property Organization (covering much of English-speaking Africa), and the Organisation Africaine de la Propriete Intellectuelle (covering much of French-speaking Africa). However, each of these organizations have their own offices for evaluating patents. So you can't just go to the Estonian Patent Office, have your application examined by them, and get a European patent. A European patent application is examined by EPO itself.

Quick followup, I found a great reference site for domain name battles at http://www.domainbattles.com .

It's up to date, informative, and very interesting, for example, White Pine lost a battle to take over CU-SEEME.NET, but HP won a battle for HPWEB.COM.

-Todd

There's a big difference between going after generic names like "tv" or "news" and what MP3.com's CEO, Michael Robertson, has a history of doing. His domain squatting involved buying the domains of already-known entities -- if you think he was doing it for their benefit, I got a bridge to sell ya. Some of the domain names he owned: talk-city.com, win-zip.com, meta-crawler.com, meta-crawler.net, and four-11.com. He's even admitted that he bought MP3.com when he realized that it was showing up at the top of the search engines' "most searched terms" lists.

(For more info, check out the results from when the real Talk City defeated Mr. Robertson in WIPO arbitration: The Panel finds that Mr. Robertson owns a domain name (talk-city.com) identical or confusingly similar to Talk City's trademark (TALK CITY), has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name, and registered and used the domain name in bad faith. These three factors entitle Talk City to an order transferring the domain name from Mr. Robertson to Talk City. Policy 4(a). [bold mine])

Cheers,

In the absence of any competitors for the Crew name, jcrew versus asquatter was no contest.

Moreover, having scanned through the decisions of WIPO versus those of eResolution it strikes me that many of WIPO's cases seem more clear cut than those presented to eResolutions. I do not have the time right now to establish whether the increased market share allegation is true, but it seems the case that WIPO has always had the larger share of the market. I suspect a modicum of journalistic hubris.

In the absence of any competitors for the Crew name, jcrew versus asquatter was no contest.

Moreover, having scanned through the decisions of WIPO versus those of eResolution it strikes me that many of WIPO's cases seem more clear cut than those presented to eResolutions. I do not have the time right now to establish whether the increased market share allegation is true, but it seems the case that WIPO has always had the larger share of the market. I suspect a modicum of journalistic hubris.

Here are some of the decisions from the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center:
Decisions (in English)
Décisions (in French)
Resoluciones (in Spanish)

Here are some of the decisions from the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center:
Decisions (in English)
Décisions (in French)
Resoluciones (in Spanish)

Here are some of the decisions from the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center:
Decisions (in English)
Décisions (in French)
Resoluciones (in Spanish)

In one instance (specifically microsoft.org, case summary) Microsoft won the case in large part because the domain holder failed to respond when contacted by the WIPO arbiters.

People, if you think you've got a right to a domain, defend it! If the possessor of microsoft.org had sought to use it as a "Microsoft sucks" site or something along those lines, he might have had a fighting chance at keeping it! (Of course, it seems that he may have been squatting on the domain, though we don't know since he never answered for himself.)

It's hard to complain about an 81% failure rate when the defendants are doing nothing.

yours,
john

Zero International Holding GmbH & Co. Kommanditgesellschaft v. Beyonet Services and Stephen Urich

I don't know if many of you realize this, but whenever some one signs up for a domain name with network solutions, apparently they agree to settle all disputes via arbitration with the WIPO.

Take a look at the list that someone else mentioned, and you see that nearly all of the disputes were settled by transfer of the domain name.

Some are very obvious domain squatters, but some of them are honest, non-trademark-infringing domains. Yet another reason not to use NetSol

I knew I hated phonics "

[SARCASM]Great... we really needed a precedent set for taking a way a properly used domain name because it is phonetically similar to the name of foreign entity...[/SARCASM]

Are the judges and lawmakers of this world *THAT* fucked up in the head?!?!?! Seriously? Some of the things they come up with continue to defy explaination. There *MUST* be some alien conspiracy causing people to make decisions like this, probably to make it easier to take us over when the main fleet gets here in a few decades.

In all seriousness though, I hope that this is overturned somehow...And while I realize that a: not everyone is religous ,and b: In some countries [ie Brazil] soccer *IS* a religion, does it make sense to anyone that the World Intellectual Property Organization is basically saying that the word "Corinthians" is better well known as a soccer team than as a religious text. Ha!

In doing some reasearch, I found a site with various domain name disputes. One dispute [that has been decided] jumped out at me. It seems that a fellow in Germany registered 'scientologie.org' and of course you-know-which-quasi-religious-entity had a hissy fit. In this case, even though that 'religious' entity had a trade mark on SCIENTOLOGIE, the judge dismissed the case...

It'd be nice if they were at least consistent, no?

Ender

PS. having looked further into it, there were [to me] good reasons for letting the guy keep the domain.

I trying to answer my own question, I did manage to find this list of aribtrations performed by the WIPO. They are apparently one of several groups that can solve disputes.

no, LPG is LIQUEFIED PETROLEUM GAS
ref from Wipo
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

It is worth noting that the UNDP actively promotes Linux in 3rd world countries.

That's right, the Sustainable Development Networking Programme (a UNDP Programme) has a category for Open Source News, and it's almost like reading /. :-)

I agree that a International Agency is needed in these disputes, but I imidiately get a little anxious when the agency that now exists has a "best viewed with" on their homepage. That's bad.

Also, if you check out their primer on electronic commerce, it has a bias towards protecting the rights of distributors:

If rightsholders are secure in their ability to sell and license their property over the Internet, they will exploit this market fully and make more and more valuable works available through this medium.

(This exactly BSA rhetoric.) They acknowledge that both the public's interest and the interests of rightholders must be taken into account:

[...] providing appropriate balance for the public interest, particularly education, research and access to information;

But then goes on in to describe the problems arising for rightholders in detail, but fail completely to even outline the problems faced by the public.

So, we need to educate this agency.

It says:

7. It is recognized that the determinations flowing from the administrative procedure do not, as such, have the weight of binding precedent under national judicial systems.

I don't know anything about international law, but this seems somewhat toothless. It looks as if WIPO is just going to be an organ of corporate control. Corporations will be able to use WIPO's decisions to bully citizens of virtually any country, even though they have NO legal jurisdiction to do so.

The WIPO's FAQ about ICANN and domain name arbitration can be found here.
Do a search on 'ICANN'. Sorry for not including the final link, but they use frames.

However, way back when the world was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I ran a Catalog site that linked to numerous story site, including fanfic, and looked up quite a bit of the law on fanfic and copyright protection.

It's interesting, and mostly precedent rather than law, which is one reason why studio are cautious about going to court on fanfic - there are precedents either way. However, most precedents that I found when researching actually err in favor of the public.

Just a few highpoints - Plots cannot be copyrighted or trademarked. Even if Shakespeares works were still under copyright today, the play West Side Story, while an obvious updating mof Tomeo and Juliet, is an original work, not a derivitive work.

Characters and names are trickier. You can't copyright a name, or even a title (The words 'Star Trek' are not covered by copyright for instance), however you can trademark them. However Trademark law is much looser than copyright law in what you can do with a trademark, so long as your not devalueing or dissipating the trademark. I can use a trademark in a story if it's either A- obvious that I'm not talking about the trademarked product (N/A to fanfic), say I'm talking about the 'Star Wars' Satellite Defense System from the 1980's - I don't even need a discaimer . . . or B- I'm using the trademark in an obviously non-competitive manner that doesn't devalue the trademark. This is why fanfic is normally found to be okay - it can't be considered to dilute or devalue the trademarks.

Unfortunately, as is SOP in this stuff, a studio can afford to harass people with threats, even when they have no real likelihood of winning, and there are precedents on both side, so even then, it's always iffy. I also have no idea how the DMCA affects things, but I doubt it's a good effect. I'm also putting stuff out from when *I* got interested, several years ago. IANAL, I could be misremembering, or even just plain wrong.

trademark law: an overview

World Intellectual Property Organization

As far as Canadian courts enforcing a judgment against a Canadian person entered by a U.S. court, there is a recent case, Braintech where a Texas court issued a judgment against a Canadian and the Canadian court decided that the behavior didn't violate Canadian law and wouldn't enforce the Texas court judgment.

Such jurisdictional issues are a hot topic in legal circles. If you want to see how a lawyer thinks about these issues, read the text of a speech given yesterday at a conference at George Mason University here. The American Bar Association has an "Internet Jurisdiction" project which you can read about here.

Finally, I think it is important to remember that there are international treaties relating to intellectual property that are very valuable to U.S. citizens because our higher than average standard of living is based, to a significant degree, on the IP that we create. You can read the two treaties that are the basis for the DMCA under the "documents" section here.

First, a word about register.com. You may want to read through the DNSO archives, the IFWP list, and the DOMAIN-POLICY archives to see what register.com has been up to, particularly regarding the single-letter domains.

You may also want to have a look at their registration agreement, particularly the bit on information ownership. They own all your contact information, and can do whatever they want with it.

Note the section in 6d above where they explicitly say you give them the right to use your information for targeted marketing.

Others aren't any better. BulkRegister has been phone-spamming people with completely automated unsolicited phone calls, in violation of US State and Federal law.

Joker.com and the other current and past CORE registrars have had significant problems in the past, and CORE is losing registrars right and left.

Most of the registrars have had significant and in some cases highly-publicised problems interacting using the SRS -- the Shared Registry System, resulting in things like aol.com's ownership being transferred to an individual (and later changed back), and other domain names not owned by big companies not being so lucky in having their ownership info corrected.

There's a problem with CORE registrars as well...several years ago, when people were once again trying to get new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), CORE managed to have a set of 7 TLD agreed upon. CORE registrars were pre-selling registrations in these 7 TLDs last year. They've now stopped, but should those & go active, it's still unknown whether or not anyone will have a fair shot at registering within them due to these pre-sells.

I'd personally recommend becoming a member of the OpenSRS project, and being your own registrar.

If you can't or won't do that, then do the following: Find and take the time to READ each registrar's Domain Dispute Policy and Registration Agreement, and think of what it means to you if your domain name ownership is challenged. The challenges are mushrooming, and all signs point to corporations getting whatever they want. Go see the resolved UDRP cases to get a feeling for how the wind is currently blowing.

1) You've ALWAYS been able to participate in ICANN. Every time someone's posted anything related to domain policy, I've practically begged people to get involved, join working groups, and work to ensure things like the ICANN UDRP were fair to individuals. All you've ever had to do to get involved was to subscribe to a DNSO mailing list. (You can't join the ASO, but don't feel bad -- they're not letting ISPs join either.)

2) You will not legally be a "member" of anything. ICANN has gone to great lengths to ensure there is no such thing as a legal membership. In fact, they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal counsel to ensure that there's little if any accountability within ICANN at all.

3) You will not get to elect board members. You will get to elect a handful of people, who will then CHOOSE the 9 new board members, and only then with the consent of the existing board.

4) Did I mention that you've ALWAYS had the ability to participate in ICANN and have your voice heard?

5) If you join the At Large Membership without informing yourself first, you'll only be harming EVERYONE. Take some time and learn what's been going on before you jump in and implicitly support what ICANN's been up to:

Go read how WIPO is using the ICANN UDRP to enfore implicit beliefs that the Net is nothing but the web, only businesses should own domain names, and only trademark owners should have rights to those names: WIPO dispute decisions

Go read how the UDRP was created in the DNSO WG-A. Go read how corporations want to prohibit you from registering any domain name that contains a trademarked substring (e.g., whereitsatt.com contains ATT) in WG-B. Go read how members of WG-B are trying everything they can to stop the rollout of new top-level domains in WG-C. Go see how the DNSO general assembly deteriorated, destroyed itself and was censored...the GA is the precursor of the ICANN At-Large membership, and should serve as a warning to any considering joining: DNSO Archives

In short, go read up on the history of ICANN and domain name policy before you lend your name to it. Rest assured, Mike Roberts is going to take every opportunity to hold up your membership as implicit support for what ICANN's doing. And you should think long and hard about whether you do support what ICANN's been up to. It may be trendy and cool to bash NSI, but to support ICANN just because they're not NSI may be the poorest decision you've ever made.

Go see for yourself what ICANN is before you lend your name to it.

Points (i), (ii), and(iii), really depend on what the laws in Uruguay say.

If the GPL is not enforceable under their laws (does anyone know for sure?) then point (i) is irrelevant.

Also, (point (ii)) it doesn't matter if the name LinuxTECH was coined to deliberately confuse people. What matters is if it is close enough to some other trademarked name (i.e. Linux) to legally be considered confusing (note: this is how it works in the US and Canada. I don't know about Uruguay). I don't know exactly what the criteria are for determining this, but I doubt that LinuxTECH would qualify (but maybe Lenux, Linex, or Linuks would...). Yes, it may be sneaky, but it is also legal and makes good business sense.

Point (iii) is like making a gamble. Basically, it must be shown that the term Linux is considered to refer to the product that we all know as Linux, and this must be shown in Uruguay. Otherwise, there is no existing Trademark. I don't know how popular Linux is in Uruguay, but the decision might just hinge around this concept.

Something worth noting: Uruguay is a party to the Paris Treaty, which means (as I understand it) that the date of filing is considered to be the date of filing in all other states that are party to the Paris Treaty, provided an application is filed within six months of this date. Obviously, Linux is Trademark in some of these states (i.e. The United States). But there are probably some states in which Linux is not a registered Trademark. Now what??? Essentially, it means that they could file for Trademark in these locations within six months, and if it is registered, then they would hold the registered Trademark in these locations, regardless of what happens now -- in other words, even if someone else files for Trademark in one of these countries, the date of the application in Uruguay would be the date of the application in other countries, provided the application by Mr. Francisco Pereira and Mr. Enrique Place de Cuadrois is made within six months.

At this point, the only thing that can be done is to fight the application in Uruguay. If it is accepted, then who knows what will happen next...

For more info on the Paris Treaty, go to http://www.wipo.org.

Since there is a lot of speculation on what the report is all about, why not look at the real thing?

See http://wipo2.wipo.int/process/e ng/final_report.html

The World Intellectual Property Organization's Final Report on "The Management of Internet Names And Addresses: Intellectual Property Issues" is in all but one major respect a substantial improvement on the Interim Report.

• The attempt to define "abusive registrations" represents a good-faith effort to define cybersquatting. While this new definition will no doubt benefit from public comment and discussion, it seems to hew closely to the definitions evolving in the various courts that have considered the issue.
• Unfortunately, the Final Report leaves essentially unchanged the proposals in the Interim Report regarding the proposed treatment of globally famous trademarks. It proposes a baroque ad hoc quasi-judicial procedure based on vague (and in once case prejudicial) criteria to define when a trademark is sufficiently internationally famous to be granted special privileges on the Internet that the mark would not currently have under law. At present there is no agreed definition of a globally famous mark, although WIPO-sponsored panels have been seeking formulate a definition for years. Furthermore, the WIPO proposal rejects imposing any upper limit on the number of trademarks that may be declared "famous," perhaps because it is impossible to predict how many marks will qualify.
• As noted regarding the Interim Report, parties who lose their domain names under the proposed dispute resolution procedure and believe the arbitrator erred may find it difficult to find a court capable of hearing their claim. Because the Final Report restricts the dispute resolution procedure to a much narrower class of cases than did the Interim Report, one can expect that there will be many fewer such cases than initially feared - but not zero.
• In addition, there are a number of relatively minor ambiguities and possible errors relating to material which appears for the first time in the Final Report. This material will benefit from public review; and in some cases some of this material may need minor revision.
• While not strictly an intellectual property issue, and without wishing to minimize the complexity and importance of the real issues that remain to be determined, the Final Report's discussion of new gTLDs and especially the creation of a new privacy-enhanced gTLD for non-commercial uses, is a less ringing endorsement than one might have hoped.

Executive Summary

Domain names are the human-friendly form of
Internet addresses. While designed to serve the
function of enabling users to locate computers in
an easy manner, domain names have acquired a
further significance as business identifiers and,
as such, have come into conflict with the system
ofbusiness identifiers that existed before the
arrival of the Internet and that are protected by
intellectual property rights.

WIPO RFC3 Executive Summary

Translation: Looks like this Internet thing is
going to make us a lot of money. However, the
rules of the game are too simple, making it
difficult for us to manipulate them

Our lawyers must correct this oversight in the
usual manner, by lobbying governments to hold
summits (making the appearance of officiality),
and out of those drafting labyrinthine documents,
incomprehensible to all but them, ensuring the
continued necessity of their employ and the
employ of future generations of lawyers.

Only when we are satisified that our
recommendations are incomprehensible to both the
politicians and their constituents (and therefore
easily manipulated and extensible by us) will
they become law.

Go to it boys and girls!
---------------------------------
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage,