Theme: Intellectual Property

A court in the Hague has ordered the Netherlands' Pirate Party to stop helping people overcome blocks to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Anti-piracy group Brien complained the political party was helping users find ways to access the site, despite an earlier ruling ordering two of the country's largest ISPs to block it. The court also upheld an order banning the party from offering a proxy to enable people find links to The Pirate Bay without visiting the site itself. The Pirate Party describes the ruling as a win for Brien and a loss for democracy and a free Internet.

Controversial efforts to clampdown on piracy by seizing domain names have been dealt a blow after one owner succeeded in forcing the US government to admit it has no evidence of infringement, despite having suspended his name - Dajaz1.com - for over a year. Previously sealed court papers revealed that music industry body RIAA had been providing authorities with list of domains that held copyrighted material. However, it turned out that the material on Dajaz1.com had been provided by the music industry itself as part of a broader promotional effort.

In 2005, I came across an article in the New York Times about a funny little battle that was going on in the Internet corner of the world that no one outside of the small circle of Internet geeks seemed to understand or care about.

This article was memorable for several reasons. First, it was cogent, humorous, it rose above the dirty, confused, detail and explained why this stuff was important for all of us. Secondly, it was written by a politician. That politician was Carl Bildt.

Fast forward to this week. I was asked to moderate a couple of sessions at the Stockholm Internet Forum, and to provide some reflections at the end of the conference. This article highlights some of the themes I picked up from the two days of discussion.

Taylor moderating one of the sessions. Credit: Swedish Internet Forum

The following presentation was given at a special session on Rights Protection Mechanisms at ICANN's Costa Rica meeting on 14 March 2012. See a full summary of that session. (Download slides)

Agenda

• Background on new rights protection mechanisms
• Trademark Clearinghouse
• URS
• PDDRP

Background

• New gTLD Program founded in GNSO policy recommendations
• GNSO Recommendation 3: Strings must not infringe the existing legal rights of others that are recognized or enforceable under generally accepted and internationally recognized principles of law.

Development of the RPMs

Rights Protections Mechanisms

New requirements

• At start-up:

KURT PRITZ: Good morning, everybody. Can we take seats? Thank you for giving some of your valuable time to come to this session on the progress made in the implementation of rights protection mechanisms. We hope it's informative. You'll have the ability to ask questions at the end. It will describe work that's occurred in preparation for the launch of the new gTLDs and the implementation of the rights protection mechanisms and the work that's going to occur. Specifically, we're going to discuss the implementation of the Trademark Clearinghouse, which includes a trademark validation service and also database administration service and provides Sunrise and IP claim services for new registries; the Uniform Rapid Suspension system, which is a rapid take-down process. And, finally, we're starting with esoteric acronyms that almost exceed the ICANN limit for letter number. But Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Process, which is a remedy for those seeking a remedy directly against new registries rather than individual registrants that's operated under very careful standards.

Domain name system overseer ICANN will create a two-tier Internet later this year with thousands of new Internet extensions required to follow different contractual obligations than the existing 21 "generic top-level domains" or gTLDs.

Under the terms of a new contract for the Internet's largest registry - dot-com - published this week for public comment, current owner Verisign will not be obliged to follow many of the new provisions created for new gTLDs.

As operator of the dot-com registry, for example, it will not have to abide by the new trademark protections included in the new gTLD process: the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS), Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Process (PDDRP), and Trademark Clearinghouse (TC).

It will also not be contractually affected by the radical market shift that ICANN has decided upon where suppliers of domain names (registrars) and operators of Internet extensions (registries) will no longer have to be entire separate entities.

Since the dot-com contract acts as the forerunner of any changes to the other existing registry contracts, it is extremely unlikely that the contractual changes developed over six years for new gTLDs will be applied to any existing extensions.

Glen de Saint Géry: GNSO Secretariat, should I do the roll call?

Stéphane van Gelder: Yes, please.

Glen de Saint Géry: Jeff Neuman?

Jeff Neuman: Present.

Glen de Saint Géry: And you have the proxy vote for Ching Chiao who is absent.

Jeff Neuman: Yes.

Glen de Saint Géry: Jonathan Robinson?

Jonathan Robinson: Present.

Glen de Saint Géry: Mason Cole?

Mason Cole: Here.

Glen de Saint Géry: Yoav Keren?

Yoav Keren: Yes.

Glen de Saint Géry: Stephane Van Gelder?

Stephane Van Gelder: Yes.

Glen de Saint Géry: Thomas Rickert?

Thomas Rickert: Yes.

Glen de Saint Géry: John Berard?

John Berard: I am here.

Glen de Saint Géry: Zahid Jamil?

Zahid Jamil: Here.

Glen de Saint Géry: Brian Winterfeldt?

Ladies and gentlemen, we will be starting our next session, new gTLDs, program update, in two minutes. If you could kindly take your seats.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you would be kind enough to take your seats, we'd like to start our program.

All right. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you're not in this meeting to listen to it, there are lots of places to go and talk, so we are going to begin this meeting.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Kurt Pritz, senior vice president, ICANN.

KURT PRITZ: Good morning, everyone. So I'm just going to give us a second to, like, close the door, because I'm vain.

So I was listening to President Chinchilla's speech, and two points. One is that it's remarkable that people can be emotionally moved by a speech where they're reading the translation of it. Kind of remarkable.

And two, that she characterized the Internet as a "hope" rather than a "threat." And I think in our own small way, that's how we chose to characterize the new gTLD program.