Next week on February 3 the GNSO (General Names Supporting Organization) of ICANN will take a vote on a motion that will determine whether ICANN will consider UDRP reform.

The motion up for vote includes the following:

“”RESOLVED #2, the GNSO Council requests an Issues Report on the current state of the UDRP. This effort should consider: How the UDRP has addressed the problem of cybersquatting to date, and any insufficiencies/inequalities associated with the process. Whether the definition of cybersquatting inherent within the existing UDRP language needs to be reviewed or updated.”

We reached out to  Philip Corwin, Counsel to the Internet Commerce Association, for his comment on this upcoming vote of the GNSO motion that would start the ball rolling on UDRP reform; This is what Phil had to say:
“The ICA has been calling for balanced and comprehensive consideration of UDRP reform for almost two years.

“Therefore, we welcome the motion before the GNSO on February 3rd and urge its adoption so that this lengthy process can begin.”

We’ve had ten years of experience with the UDRP, and both registrants and complainants have legitimate concerns, so let’s get all the interested parties in the same room and see if we can find some common ground. We constantly hear from trademark interests that the UDRP isn’t working for them, so we’re rather mystified to read that the Intellectual Property Constituency will likely oppose the Motion.”

“ICA has also called upon ICANN to retain an impartial third party expert to compare UDRP decision trends with the state of Internet trademark law in major jurisdictions, because they are really starting to diverge — especially now that courts in the US and EU have said it’s okay for Google to sell trademarks as keywords. After all, the UDRP is supposed to protect statutory trademark rights, not create new ones. We’ve also opposed ICANN’s certification of any new UDRP providers until we get procedural reforms that assure some consistency and uniformity in UDRP decisions.”

“Summing up, we’re ready to engage in good faith discussions about balanced UDRP reform — but we’ll fight like hell against any one-sided approach that fails to consider the concerns and ideas of domain registrants.”
Nicely said

I think if you polled domainers who has been involved or follow UDRP cases, the vast majority would agree reform is needed to stop the highly inconsistent decisions, and mandate that UDRP decisions be consistent with  court decisions.

Phil makes the point we have made several times in the past which is how can it logically be stated that Google can do in perfectly legal fashion what domain holders cannot, that is serve up PPC pages that contain links to the trademark holder of their competitors.

Many suits have been filed against Google (and a few against Yahoo) claiming the practice of selling keywords of trademark terms violates trademark law, and each and everytime a court has decided one of the these cases they have decided it in Google or Yahoo favor.

How can domainer lose there domains for doing what Google and Yahoo make millions doing?

In offline business there can be hundreds of business using the same name even though it maybe tradedmarked. For example there are hundreds of businesses around the world using the term “Four Seasons” as all or part of there name and as long as they are not in the hotel business its perfectly fine.

UDRP law is quite old at ths point and in Internet Years is ancient.

The time has come for reform

Of course if the motion for reform does pass that means the whole process is up for debate and the trademark groups will be arguing to make the laws even stronger for themselves.

So once again it is imperative that domainers support the ICA efforts as they will be one of the only groups to represent domain holders in this process.

Just so you know that among those who will be voting on this GNSO Motion up for consideration on February 3 , is Tim Ruiz is with Godaddy and Jeff Neuman with Neustar.