[gnso-rpm-wg] Inferences (was Re: Mp3, Attendance, AC recording & AC Chat Review of all Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) PDP Working Group)

[George Kirikos]

Hi Georges,

On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 11:19 AM, Nahitchevansky, Georges
<ghn at kilpatricktownsend.com> wrote:
> George Kirikos.  You are talking about one registry out of how many?  Moreover, I disagree with your conclusions.  For example, the fact that there are anti voter fraud laws in place in many jurisdictions does not in and of itself mean that there is widespread voter fraud.  Having prophylactic measures in place is just good business.  The same applies here.  The only thing we have seen showing that any kind of gaming was done was with one very limited situation by a domainer who registered some common trademarks to then obtain a handful of domain names.  This is hardly evidence of abuse by bona fide trademark owners. So again, why waste all this time in pursuit of a negative.

Uniregistry operates more than one TLD, and I did not provide an
exhaustive list of all the counter-measures.

A better analogy than your anti-voter fraud laws is the proliferation
of spam-filtering, as a counter-measure to the rise in spam volume.
Indeed, for new gTLDs, some folks are resorting to blocking entire
TLDs:

https://www.google.com/search?q=blocking+tlds+spam
https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/

I know I've never seen an email to myself from .cricket or .stream
that wasn't spam. The fact that folks are blocking entire TLDs, or
using spam filtering in general *arose* from the abuse, just like the
Uniregistry counter-measures arose from observing the gaming. Same
applies to others holding back names (as per yesterday's discussion of
premium and/or "premium-reserved" names, some of that is perhaps a
response to gaming of the TMCH).

What you describe as "one limited situation by a domainer" is
incorrect. There were multiple entities detected based on the limited
data that was available.

As for "hardly evidence of abuse by bona fide trademark owners" opens
the question "who is a bona fide trademark owner" --- care to answer?
Some seem to take the position that anyone that has a mark registered
in the Benelux or Pakistan or whichever has the loosest standards at
any point in time is "bona fide", i.e. the "a trademark is a trademark
is a trademark" crowd, who say "thou shall not ever question the
validity of any registered trademark. Only national authorities can
ever question a trademark." Others take a different view, e.g.
consider the decisions in:

https://eu.adr.eu/adr/decisions/decision.php?dispute_id=3147
http://eu.adr.eu/adr/decisions/decision.php?dispute_id=2438

where registered trademarks for "ASK" and "AUTOTRADER" by a domain
name registrant used in a sunrise, in the class of "plectrums" weren't
enough to allow the registrant to keep the domain name, despite their
registered TM never being formally invalidated by a national
authority.

Perhaps if you will give us a strong "test" for who is a bona fide
trademark owner, so that those failing the test can be removed from
the TMCH, that would go a long way to help justifying the continuation
of the TMCH. With that test, we can also look at the data and see how
many TMCH recordals were accepted by Deloitte that failed the test.

Sincerely,

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