[bc-gnso] IRT Final Report is an abomination and wholly unbalanced

[George Kirikos]

Hi folks,

The IRT final report was published on the ICANN website a few hours
ago. Here's a copy of our initial comments:

----- start of comments ----------
I was holding out hope that the IRT would actually take into account
the public comments of the non-IP world and create a balanced report.
We made extensive comments in good faith that reflected the needs of
responsible registrants:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/irt-draft-report/msg00000.html
http://forum.icann.org/lists/irt-draft-report/msg00015.html
http://forum.icann.org/lists/irt-draft-report/msg00016.html

(the 3rd link in particular discussed a novel approach that would
protect ALL registrants from new gTLD confusion at the top level in an
elegant manner, and was superior to the rehash of old ideas produced
by the IRT)

I just finished reading the final report and frankly it is an
abomination, showing total disregard for balanced solutions that
protect the rights of legitimate registrants. Trademark trolls who
wish to reverse hijack valuable domain names would be cheering at this
report, if it was implemented without significant changes.

The URS in particular is an extremist view of trademark rights, tilted
in favour of IP interests compared to the UDRP and beyond what is
protected or recognized by law and due process. It also obfuscates the
dual requirement of BOTH bad faith use AND registration (there are
lots of inconsistencies in the language that seek to weaken the
standard to make it "OR" instead of "AND"). The level of defaults will
be even higher than the UDRP simply because good faith registrants
never receive actual notice of complaints. Even faxes were considered
too expensive! A 1 page fax, using email-to-fax technology (so it can
easily be automated by the URS provider) would cost less than $1
ANYWHERE in the world! The IRT team should try sending registered
letters in a statistically valid sample size and measure how long it
takes them to be delivered to different parts of the world -- it can
be more than a week, even from the USA to Canada, let alone from
Europe to Canada. And the URS was said to be a "higher burden" than
the UDRP, yet no consideration was given to the creation date of the
domain name! Restricting the URS to recently registered domains would
have demonstrated that the IRT was showing balance, i.e. only wanting
to cover "clear cut" cases of abuse. Frankly, the IRT team is
demonstrating that their tactics and extreme positions can be even
worse than those of the cybersquatters that they decry and detest.

I will do a detailed deconstruction of the final report in the coming
weeks (there are more pressing comments required by the NTIA first),
however simply re-read the comments that I and others submitted
previously. They were completely ignored.
---- end of comments -------------

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/