Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UN wants to stop "cybersquatting"

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the drunk-with-power dept.

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.

1 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Those quotes refer to the OLD draft... by Froomkin · · Score: 5
    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
    --

    I have a blog.