ICANN on Wednesday held a Consultation Session on Trademark Protection & Malicious Behavior with the IRT (Implementation Recommendation Team). The IRT was formed after the ICANN Board requested the Intellectual Property Constituency to gather people for IRT in March 2009. This session has been scheduled in view of the rise of UDRP cases across the world. WIPO reports that there has been a 7% increase in UDRP cases in 2008, with 27,000 domain names disputed since 1999. For this reason, trademark protection is getting a lot of attention from ICANN and the Internet community, especially since the launch of the new gTLD program is underway.
UDRP is the process that domain users follow when faced with problems on trademark protection or identity theft. The UDRP guides the current domain owners and interested parties to secure ownership of a particular domain name. Still, on the subject of improving or updating the UDRP, the IRT believes that the current statistics suggests that the UDRP is effective enough in deterring more rights violations considering that there has only been 27,000 domain names disputed out of 150 million registrations within the same period.
Meanwhile, rights owners who had been victims of rights violations were asked for the reasons on why their domain names got into trouble in the first place. The reasons that were given were the following: registrar failure, ccTLD technical system, serial cyber squatters who are too difficult to stop. With the reasons mentioned, the domain owners end up feeling frustrated as if they have been cheated. It is therefore very important for rights owners to choose their registrars carefully.
For its part, the IRT hopes ICANN will efficiently protect the rights of others in an expanded domain name system, or when the new TLDs are launched perhaps next year.
By Arlene Paredes |
