[gnso-rpm-wg] Proposal for the elimination of Sunrise Period

[Paul Tattersfield]

I’m not sure I agree. The Claims Notices are likely to have a far bigger
impact on people not registering domains especially those who are not
professional registrants and have not seen a claims notice before.



No Claims Notices should be issued without a substantive review of the
underlying goods and services.

The idea that anyone can buy a piece of paper without any real goods or
services to protect and can then use that piece of paper to discourage
others from building real world businesses simply because some
jurisdictions give out those pieces of paper out like confetti under the
pretext of ideas they ‘might want to do in the future’ should be deeply
frowned upon by anyone participating in ICANN.

Paul

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 7:56 PM, Jeremy Malcolm <jmalcolm at eff.org> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> * Open questions 7 and 8 illustrate how the protections provided to
> trademark holders through the TMCH have been applied too broadly by the
> provider, opening the door for gaming and abuse by trademark holders, and
> chilling of speech by affected third parties. This proposal also bears on
> question 16 (Does the scope of the TMCH and the protections mechanisms
> which flow from it reflect the appropriate balance between the rights of
> trademark holders and the rights of non-trademark registrants?). It has
> been seen that the TMCH has facilitated trademark owners claiming exclusive
> rights in domain names that they don’t exist in domestic trademark law,
> such as words incorporated into design marks. Open question 10, rather than
> addressing the potential for abuse, actually suggests a measure that would
> allow even more non-trademarked terms to be locked up by priority
> claimants. As a measure to address these problems, we propose eliminating
> the TMCH’s Sunrise Registration service altogether. Although we also have
> concerns about its Trademark Claims service and will likely propose its
> elimination separately at a later date, the Sunrise Registration service is
> the most urgent to eliminate, because it creates an absolute bar to third
> parties registering domains that a Sunrise registrant has already claimed,
> whereas the Trademark Claims service results in a warning to third parties
> but does not absolutely preclude them from registering. We believe that the
> elimination of Sunrise Registrations would be the simplest way to address
> the problems of gaming and abuse that have been observed by working group
> members, not only in respect of design marks and geographical words, but
> also the misuse of dubious trademarks over common dictionary words such as
> “the”, “hotel”, “luxury”, “smart”, “one”, “love”, and “flower” to lock up
> domains unrelated to the original trademark. If the Sunrise Registration
> system were widely used by trademark holders, then it might be claimed that
> its elimination was disproportionate—but as we have seen, this is not the
> case. There have been only about 130 Sunrise Registrations per new domain.
> Such a small number of claims could be more simply and efficiently handled
> simply by allowing those claimants to resort to curative mechanisms such as
> the UDRP in the event that a third-party registrant beats them to
> registering a domain over which they might have made a claim. The benefits
> of the elimination of Sunrise Registrations would be: - An overall cost
> saving. - Streamlining of the public availability of domains in new
> registries. - Elimination of the potential for gaming and abuse by putative
> trademark holders who claim rights over domain names that do not correspond
> to their domestic trademark rights. The costs would be: - Some trademark
> holders would be required to resort to curative proceedings if domain names
> over which they have a legitimate claim are registered by third parties. *
>
> --
> Jeremy Malcolm
> Senior Global Policy Analyst
> Electronic Frontier Foundationhttps://eff.orgjmalcolm@eff.org
>
> Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161 <(415)%20436-9333>
>
> :: Defending Your Rights in the Digital World ::
>
> Public key: https://www.eff.org/files/2016/11/27/key_jmalcolm.txt
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