UN wants to stop "cybersquatting"

Pugget writes "The UN announced a plan to stop the buying up of domain names buy people unrelated to the name. " Basically they say they're gonna create a list of trademarks that can't be registered. I'm more concerned about the 'misleadingly similiar' clause. That'll make parodies a lot trickier.

Comments

The answer is simple: Pay before you register

[Kurt Gray]

I am also peeved at domain squatters -- I've had
many a good idea for a web site and jumped into
whois to check the domain name and lo' and behold
some "Domains For Sale" jack off is squatting on
it!!

...this is because anyone can squat on a domain
name for 6 months and not pay for it. When the 6
months is up, they let it go, then register it
again under another name. They can squat on
hundreds of names and their cost is almost
nothing. They hold the names hostage until some
poor dumbass coughs up thousands of dollars for
it!

Solution:

Make registrants pay the two year fee *before*
the domain is registered rather than giving
them a 6 month free ride.

True, some slimes will still find it worth their
while to squat on hot names and trademarks but
the larger issue these scumbags who hold half
of the dictionary of common words hostage would
quickly find another scam business to get into.

Major Flaws in the WIPO Domain Name Proposal

[coats]

Have a look at this analysis by A. Michael Froomkin, Professor of Law at the University of Miami, and a Member, WIPO Panel of Experts, Internet Domain Name Process: http://www.law.miami.edu/~amf/quickgui de.htm

In short, Froomkin says the plan is seriously flawed, and constitutes a radical subversion of existing legal checks and balances:

• Bias. The plan is biased in favor of trademark holders [as opposed to others using the web as a means of speech and press];
• Enabling censorship. The WIPO plan fails to protect fundamental free-speech interests including parody, and criticism of corporations;
• Zero Privacy. The WIPO plan provides zero privacy protections for the name, address and phone number of individual registrants;
• Intimidation. The WIPO plan creates an expensive loser-pays arbitration process with uncertain rules [Plaintiff gets to choose rules anywhere in the world!! -- not just in defendant's country] that will intimidate persons who have registered into surrendering valid registrations;
• Tilts the playing field. The WIPO plan would always allow challengers to domain names registrations to appeal to a court, but would often deny this privilege to the original registrant;
• Smorgasbord approach to law. Instead of directing arbitrators to apply applicable law, WIPO proposes using additional, different, rules it selected-rules that will often disadvantage registrants.

Froomkin gives a link to his detailed (50-page) analysis. I think this proposal needs to be sunk!

Final report.

[A well known coward]

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

OH NO! The UN strikes again

[Cid Highwind]

Look out good freedom-loving citizens of Amerika, the black helicopters are coming. Not for your guns, or your money, they want *your domain names* ! Oh, its enough to make any patriot quake in his knee-high steel-toed combat boots. All the red-blooded free men of America better move to a country where the UN cannot take our freedoms! I suggest Yugoslavia, or else Sudan, or maybe Sri Lanka. All those countries are not UN members, and they have fine traditions of respecting free speech and personal freedoms.

*disclaimer! this is parody. If you don't like it, bite me (or moderate me)

Please don't overheat

[Submarine]

I think that some people here are overheating.

What we've got here is an international agency; mainly led by the US, EU, Japan, proposing a plan pertaining to domain names. Such a proposition has no legal enforcing value by itself... it is a proposition.

Furthermore, it does not propose the creation of any international body to oversee anything. So it would be as the current agreements on intellectual property, trademarks, and similar things.

If you don't agree with this, don't go potty mouth about the UN. You should rather ask yourself whether those you elected to the US congress are able to understand the issues involved, because it is them who will vote any enforceable statute on the topic.

The rest of the world and parodies

[swb]

It doesn't surprise me at all that the UN membership would generally support censorship and restrictions on free speech. Of the member states of the UN, what perctentage of those governments do you suppose have a real permissive attitude towards parody and satire in general?

Would you put it at about the same percentage of countries that have a free press and a constitutionally or legally enshrined free speech protections? Or do you think there's some kind of UN High Committee for Increasing Freedom of Speech and Parody And Satire, co-chaired by China and Myanmar, with Afghanistan and Nigeria as contributers?

Considering that in most countries criticizing big business it tantamount to criticizing whatever jackbooted thugs happen to be in charge of the junta that week (since it's usually the leadership's relatives that get the mining/planatation/slave labor concessions anyway), it's hardly surprising that the UN members would want to restrict anything that might enable criticism.

Remember, in lots of these places a mimmeograph machine is considered a threat to the government. God only knows what kind of fears wide-open communications means to those people.

Those quotes refer to the OLD draft...

[Froomkin]

No! Wait! That's my critique of the OLD draft. The new draft is quite a lot better. It fixes several -- but not all -- of the problems I identified in my 50+ page critique of the Interim Report. For my initial take on the Final Draft see here. More detailed comments will appear on my WIPO Comments Page Real Soon Now.
Here's the key part:

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.

-- Michael Froomkin
A. Michael Froomkin
U. Miami School of Law,POB 248087
Coral Gables, FL 33124,USA

Oh, good idea!

[JoeWalsh]

Yes, let's put a stop to cyber-squatting. By golly, it's high time someone did something about this.

Oh, but wait. That list they're putting together probably isn't going to have the name of MY company on it, will it? It's going to have Coca-Cola, Pepsi, KFC, and all the other huge multinationals, plus whichever companies are most favored in the various nations sponsoring this initiative.

But, hey, those big, favored companies need protection from the little guy, by golly! McDonalds and Microsoft are in real danger from the little guys. Let's expend more resources on helping them out.

Gosh, I love how things always work out in the best interests of the most vulnerable of the world's constituencies.


-Joe

Don't stick your head in the sand . . .

[werdna]

I agree with the criticisms about the UN and WIPO overstepping their bounds. However, I disagree with the sense that they cannot do anything harmful, and should be ignored. WIPO policies have been widely adopted, and when adopted by domain name registries, they can become as effective as though they were the law.

The difference here is that these rules are being promulgated by people accountable to no constituency except, of course, the special interests that sponsored their international activism. (This translates about 95% to large multinationals seeking to end-run enforceability limitations of the U.S. trademark laws.)

Understanding that it is highly likely that WIPO policies can become domain name dispute resolution policies; and that these policies, if applied, can effectively create quasi-judicial rights in gross for these well-heeled interests that they could not obtain otherwise (often for which the loser probably has no meaningful legal recourse in the courts of any nation) something must be done.

A few brave souls have been active in fighting the good fight, and have been desperate to get someone, anyone, to get interested enough to chime in and comment. Michael Froomkin at the University of Miami has been one of the leaders. He writes about the details at:

http://www.law.tm/

I would advise anyone with an interest to get "active." Whatever your thoughts about the propriety of international government, the non-governmental nature of the internet makes it quite vulnerable to this kind of de-facto policy-making, which policy-making can in time become effective as though it were the law.