Re: [ga] Re: UDRP study

["William S. Lovell" <wsl@cerebalaw.com>]

Paul:

I should mention that one thing one learns in the law is never to take
anything personally -- which I did not. I do have the obligation,
however, to speak out for the integrity of the legal profession, and
that I do.

In principle, I agree with your notion of review, but I must tell you
that one is not likely to get it in any U.S. court, at least.  I myself
regard the UDRP as an abomination from day one, but so long
as it exists, we must deal with it, so on the face of it one might
suggest implementation of a review process therein.  However,
that would imply acceptance of, and a willingness to abide by,
the UDRP process itself, and such acknowledgment of the UDRP
authority I would not give. The technical bounds of "authority" of
ICANN (now don't anybody bust your sides laughing) should
never have entered the trademark arena in the first place.

Bill

Paul Cotton wrote:

Hi Bill,

*** start ***
As a patent and trademark attorney, I must take strong exception to this
slander of the profession. It is easy to group all attorneys into one bunch
and then mouth platitudes thereon, but in so doing one forgets the basic
feature of the legal profession: every case has two sides. Of course, one
can reasonably maintain that the ICANN Intellectual Property Consituency
is loaded with attorneys that assert the trademark rights of large
corporations,
*** end ***

My apologies that you took this personally, I was not intending to slander
the profession as a whole, merely the manner in which the udrp is
intentionally and consciously stacked in favor of tm holders and
corporations by having it policed by those who could gain from extending the
power of trademarks online (despite the udrp stating that its goal was the
contrary).

Another solution would be to require that the panellists actually adhered to
the rules as laid out and do not rely upon past cases as extending the udrp
scope.  This would remove the current tower of cards that has been built by
panellists overriding the udrp rules by using past erroneous and flawed
cases as their basis.

Unless and until there is some kind of review process in place, then I fail
to see how or why there would be any impetus to change the endemic bias.

Regards

Paul Cotton
Director
SafetyNet Systems Ltd
www.joinin.com

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The URLs for Best Practices:
DNSO Citation:
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(Under "Other Information Documents"; "August 2001:
Proposal for Best Practices for the DNSO GA")
Part I:
http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/20010813.GA-BestPractices.html
Part II:
http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/20010813.GA-BP-flowchart.pdf
(Access to the .pdf file requires installing the Adobe Acrobat
Reader, which is available for free down load at
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.)