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.

Comments

ICANN

[bfree]

Having read this story with 106 comments posted already, there are a few points I feel I must make. The WIPO is now one of four ICANN "Approved Providers for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy". The other three are: The CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution, a non-profit leadership alliance of 500 major corporations and law firms; eresolution.ca ; and the National Arbitration Forum a nationwide network of former judges, litigators, and law professors who share the Forum principle that disputes should be decided according to established legal principles.

1. The U.N. is not arbitrating the TLDs for everyone, they are applying the ICANN resolution dispute policy for anyone who applies to them.
2. All the other approved providers are distinctly U.S., going as far as the "National Arbitration Forum".
3. We can see a serious level of commercialism and lawyerism from the range of providers.
4. 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! The .com, .org and .net domains are international, the generic domains of the net and should be ruled over by the net.
The 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 .com/.net/.org. Why did they not use .us though? Why does the US have a domain for each state? Does China have multiple tlds? Does the EU have a domain for its merged entity? Why the double standards (and don't tell me that you made the net so you can do what you want with it, take that attitude and we will see a net split as has already started to appear with the refusal of many tld organisations refusal to pay ICANN).

A change for the better

[bogomipe]

"Will we soon have to worry about our rights online in a legal system outside of the United States?"

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!

Specific example.

[acarey]

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.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz /storydisplay.cfm?storyID=139411

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

Internet will create one government, not anarchy

[Seth Finkelstein]

I think the answer to the question posed is "Yes". Note the agency is not the UN, but WIPO. The difference is very important. The UN is an somewhat accountable government-like body. However, WIPO is a treaty organization, and is not accountable in the same sense

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.