[tor-udrp] Law review article on UDRP

["Milton Mueller" <Mueller@syr.edu>]

"International Dispute Settlement at the Trademark-Domain Name
  Interface"
       Forthcoming in Pepperdine Law Review

       BY:  LAURENCE R. HELFER
               Loyola Law School (Los Angeles)

Document:  Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
            http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=265922

Paper ID:  Loyola-LA Public Law Research Paper 2001-9

  Contact:  LAURENCE R. HELFER
    Email:  Mailto:Larry.Helfer@lls.edu
   Postal:  Loyola Law School (Los Angeles)
            919 South Albany Street
            Los Angeles, CA 90015-0019  USA
    Phone:  213-736-1467
      Fax:  213-380-3769

Paper Requests:
  Contact Thelma Wong Terre, Mailto:thelma.terre@lls.edu or Loyola
  Law School, Los Angeles, Faculty Support Services, 919 South
  Albany Street, Los Angeles, CA 90015, USA. Phone: (213)
  736-1082, Fax: (213) 383-0495.

ABSTRACT:
  This essay identifies some of the emerging legal issues relating
  to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy ("UDRP"), a
  new anational online dispute settlement system established by a
  private, non-profit corporation, the Internet Corporation for
  Assigned Names and Numbers in late 1999. The UDRP creates a fast
  and inexpensive mechanism for trademark owners to recapture
  domain names held by persons who, in bad faith, register and use
  domain names that are confusingly similar to those marks.

  The UDRP is worthy of serious study for at least two reasons.
  First and foremost, the process by which the UDRP was created,
  and the way in which it is structured, departs significantly
  from preexisting approaches to international dispute settlement,
  not only for intellectual property rights but also for
  international law generally. These differences in creation and
  structure raise questions about the UDRP's legitimacy and thus
  the legitimacy of the case law it is producing.

  Second, UDRP is already being heralded by national and
  international lawmakers as a model for resolving a much broader
  set of transborder legal problems. Although certain aspects of
  the UDRP may be worthy of emulation, this essay asks some hard
  questions about how anational dispute settlement systems ought
  to be structured. It focuses in particular on the mechanisms
  used to control the limited powers granted to dispute settlement
  decisionmakers such as UDRP panels. And it proposes several
  steps that ICANN should take to bolster the legitimacy of this
  new dispute settlement system.


JEL Classification: O33, 034