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WIPO Settles 'Cybersquatting' Disputes
Dram writes "In this article at CNN.com they talk about how the UN is handling cybersquatting cases. The news in itself is nothing big but does this set up a precedent for the UN to handle other internet related cases? Will the UN soon be the ruling body on things like deep-linking and Napster? Will we soon have to worry about our rights online in a legal system outside of the United States?"
WIPO
stands for World Intellectual Property Organization, and they're a United Nations trademark and copyright agency.
I realize that one of my statements is not predicated by the previous post...I said that there is no place for foreign gov'ts inside of domestic policy. What I meant to say is thus: There is no need for foreign intervention into problems that individual nations can solve themselves. There's no need for Germany to shove their decision on the people of the US when the NameServers are run by the US.
.com, .net or .org, and squatters are a global problem.
Run by the US huh? Lets just look at that...
I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET - Royal Institute of Technology, Sweeden
K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET - RIPE Network Coordination Centre, Netherlands
M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET - Keio University, Japan
Fact of the matter is, the root servers are global, for the global population, not just for the US. Don't be so arrogant in thinking other nations don't have interest in the domain name space. Anyone anywhere in the world can register a
-- iCEBaLM
As a brit that has lived in the US and UK, I think I can be fairly impartial about this.
Yes, the net started in the states, but wake up guys, it has moved on. The states may account for about 50% of net usage, but that is still only 50%, there is another 50% out there, and it is growing beyond 50% as time goes on.
People are saying 'how dare the UN decide things for the US' well why not? The rest of the world is asking 'How dare the US decide things for the rest of the world'.
And hold on - wait there a moment, isnt the US *part* of the UN, I think you will find it is!
This is NOT taking rights away from US citizens, it is putting the US people on a level playing field with the rest of the world. Your UN representatives have the same power as the rest.
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
- The U.N. is not arbitrating the TLDs for everyone, they are applying the ICANN resolution dispute policy for anyone who applies to them.
- All the other approved providers are distinctly U.S., going as far as the "National Arbitration Forum".
- We can see a serious level of commercialism and lawyerism from the range of providers.
- The US is domain greedy
As an non-US citizen, I am delighted that one of the providers is not completely American, and disgusted that the "National Arbitration Forum" could be approved to rule over an international commodity! TheThe only thing that encouraged me from all my reading was that the eresolution site tried to us an appropriate domain (.ca) instead of simply using
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
http://ecommerce.w ipo.int/domains/process/eng/final/annex04.html
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 problem with what this article brings up is the issue of trademarking one's name. The specific case in question was Julie Roberts. Now, my understanding is that the original owner of the domain reg'd it and did nothing with it. He was approached by Robert's lawyers before the squatting rules were strongly in place; he offered to sell the domain for a few good bucks but they refused. After that approached, he turned the site into a fan site for Roberts, and then the squatting rules hit. The lawyers swooped in again, and claimed that his earlier offer was evidence of squatting and he lost the domain.
Ok, some of what he did was on the poor side, but let's take the case a bit further. Say I register (joking) www.patricksteward.com, and make it a fan site praising Patrick for his Shakespearing work and Trek years, etc. The site is in good nature, and no money is made off the site. Does Patrick Steward, in this case, have the ability to ask WIPO to nab the domain from the original register? Cases like the above *suggest* yes, but certainly not there yet.
Of course, I'd insert my standard rant about the need for expanded TLDs with strictly enforced rules for registering them , as such problems as the above will be limited. But I've said it before ...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Get used to it... For the rest of the world, that foreign "legal system" is the US. And if I had the choice, I'd go for a multinational representative body anyday!
- mipe -
Quite a few posts are right on here.
This is a Bad thing. And it
is just a taste of the things to come.
The UN is not accountable to The Constitution
(read: Bill of Rights). It is
an organization given power over sovereign
nations, and hence their net access.
All well and good when its on the other side
of the planet in a war zone. How would you
feel if they felt the need to intervene in
a situation in your country (the U.S. is mine)?
There is a move to expand the permanent
membership of the security council in the
works right now. Expand it with more people
not elected by you that have power over you.
World peace is a goal worthy of all our efforts,
but at the expense of self rule? Life on the
net is gonna get much harder my friends.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
Could an international committee alleviate that? Probably not. I think an international organization would be more likely to turn the net into just another global social program, of sorts. And worse, I doubt they'll be as accountable as, say, our own governments.
When Senator so and so votes to uphold the CDA or CDA2, I know who to hold accountable come the next elections, in America. Same in Australia. But what do I do if some UN Chartered (or similar) group who's members are relatively unknown and are not voted into office, decides that some random rule must be enforced and that I just have to live with it?
Further, what if the United States Government decides that they are not going to require their populace to follow said rule(s)?
I'm not a huge fan of 'government' in any form, but I have to say that I prefer the internationally independant choices of each country and jurisdiction over some half-assed elitist group of eighty-year-old computer-illiterate white-haired international internet committee. I thought the glory of the internet was supposedly the lack of need for government and the stretching of physical political boundaries -- not mass netizen unification under some group who proclaims total online governance.
But that's just me . . .
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
There's been an example of this in New Zealand just in the past week. An indigenous fishing company, Moana Pacific, discovered the domain moanapacific.com had been registered by a competitor.
/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=139411
http://www.nzherald.co.nz
They successfully had the domain overturned.
Wired has an article in the same vein as the CNN one:
http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,36899,00.html
Cheers,
Alastair
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
There is a net-libertarian idea that since Internet makes things international, that means governments will disappear. Nonesense. It means we'll get some sort of international government. And it may not be a nice one. For the proof of this, just follow the doings of ICANN, WIPO, and their ilk.
There is good reason to be paranoid about the WIPO and their sources of funding.
.com startup run by teenagers. Their IT and telecoms groups are like disneyland for the people who work there. Top of the line equipment, excessive bandwidth, and perqs that make all other orgs in the geneva area sick with envy. Since they are an international org, the foreign workers don't pay swiss taxes (local workers still have to), and all the pay scales are shifted way up. System admins would normally be on the "functionary" pay scale (US$35k, local taxes), but at the WIPO they start as mid level "administration" (US$75k tax free).
When the WIPO was created, it was entirely funded by IP holder interests. This includes the MPAA, Sony, Disney, Time Warner, and many others.
The WIPO web pages used to highlight this as a positive effect, freeing them from the normal funding hassles seen by many other international orgs who have much trouble collecting money from countries who suddenly don't want to pay. Many organisations are struggling because the US congress has stopped payments when they don't agree with an outcome. The US stopped paying the ICITO/GATT, precursor to the WTO, when a decision came down against american banana and beef interests. When the WTO agreed to side with the US, funding was restored. Europeans are very upset, and many far right nationalist politicians are gaining votes by threatening to pull out of the WTO, or declaring economic war against the US. [France is a leader here, since french doctors have shown in several scientific studies that the bovine growth hormones used in most US cattle is a major cause of obesity, and thus outlawed in france. But the WTO has ruled the french health laws do not have priority over free commerce, and ordered france to allow american beef to be sold in france. The french are refusing for now, and the US has started to heavily tax many french goods being imported into the US in retalliation. But many organic US beef farms are getting into the french market, complicating the whole thing]
Back to the WIPO topic. The WIPO is a strange beast. They have tons of money, and are spending it like a
When it became clear the WIPO was forcing treaties on countries just to benefit the IP holders at the expense of citizens rights in many countries, they scoured their web pages of any mention of their funding. Can't be documenting that possibly illegal conflict of interest.
It is very scary that the WIPO has closed door meetings open only to carefully selected delegates who are employed by some of the largest IP holders in the world. The working groups who created the wording of the treaties are run by law firms whose only clients are the main IP holders in the world, Bertelsmann, Sony, Time Warner, and a few others. They have used law students right out of university to create the most outrageous treaties, which carefully bough^H^H^H^H^Hselected politicians then introduce in each country. This results in the elimination of consumer rights in the US, with the DMCA, and similar laws snuck onto the books in other countries.
The Norwegian parliament was looking into how the WIPO treaty laws were passed without any discussion in the Stortget, as a direct result of the media attention around Jon Johansen and the deCSS case. That investigation into some corrupt politicians coupled with some other scandals (internal to Norway, not related to the WIPO) brought down the parliament earlier this year, and they are still figuring out how to clean up the corporate corruption of the political process. Any Norwegians are welcome to add comments to this, my norsk is not well enough to follow the daily papers.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Does that mean that the UN would ask for peace-keeping forces from the United States when a dispute arises between Bosnia.com and Serbia.com?
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
If those pesky French are involved, I want no part of it.
-JimTheta
My stupid web site
[paranoia on] WIPO, like WTO and GATT has more power than most people realize. WIPO meets behind closed doors and is not accountable in any true sense of the word. Do we want that type of agency or organization ruling on any matters which affect us? I don't, but it's too late because they are and we can't do much about it. What recouse have we to dispute the ruling of a non-govermental body?
On one hand, the US has some of the most boneheaded, corporate-serving IP laws in the world, and a non-US organization could knock some sense into the Net (and maybe the rest of the US) by making it finally realize that government is there to serve people, not corporations (who ever got the idea that a corporation, which isn't even a living thing much less a human being, should be treated as a person under the law anyway? That's where the mess got started).
On the other hand, the US has heavy influence in WIPO, and will likely use it to pollute the Net with its corporatist ideals (people forget that IP was never meant to benefit the inventors; it was meant to benefit the people by promoting the growth of the arts. Rewarding the inventors/artists/etc. was only a means to that end).
That's the problem with the US nowadays; the government is now little more than a front for corporations, what with all the lobbying and bribery that goes on. This is hardly a Good Thing.
But there are even more sides to the issue. Consider: most other nations restrict free speech (the US is the only nation which even ostensibly guarantees free speech to its citizens in all matters; every other nation in the world either does restrict speech or, because it is not guaranteed, could conceivably do so in the future. And before the Canadians attempt to call me on this, as they've tried before, I suggest they read the charter which grants free speech VERY carefully; it grants free speech but stops short of guaranteeing it). The US could conceivably become polluted with this as well, leaving no haven for truly free speech left on the face of the planet. People have been trying to pollute the free-speech doctrine ever since it was first introduced; at times they've succeeded temporarily but their efforts have always been overturned in the end. But if the influence of the whole rest of the world were turned towards doing it, things could be different.
So I'm wary of this. I doubt it will be a Good Thing. More than likely the status quo won't change, or the world will become polluted with even more corporate greed than before. But even worse things could happen down the road, and this would only be a step towards that.
Sorry but being European what worries me more is to have to worry about my rights online inside the United States given the recent court decisions trying to make the DMCA apply to foreign (read, not under US juridiction) websites.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Even in the US constitution there is such a clause:
What is WIPO
(emphasis added)On a tangent, one of the very good reasons for the UN to not start a war with China is that the People's Republic of China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and they would, well, have to agree to it first...
I'm going to live forever or die trying.
There is one good thing about the UN dealing with this sort of dispute that many people don't know about. The UN is a little too big for most of the influence that smaller courts come under.
You see every government which is a member must pay a prescribed fee into the UN budget. These fees are enough to run the organization so they don't need to go begging for campaign funds or other such rubbish.
It is worth noting that the UNDP actively promotes Linux in 3rd world countries. I asked one of there staff members and he said "We have a large budget but it would have to double before we could buy Windows. It would here to quadruple for all the extra staff we would need to manage that."
BTW : It was a UN staffer who introduced the Jamaica LUG to the Barbados LUG. These people have no reason to rule against the Open and Free camp unless we are genuinely in the wrong.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?