Forum’s Surprise Response to IRT — National Arbitration

UDRP arbitration forum makes surprising remarks regarding Implementation Recommendation Team findings.

That National Arbitration Forum would be opposed to Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URSS), a fast-track UDRP-like process, comes as no surprise. Following all, it would destroy 90% of NAF’s and World Intellectual Property Organization’s domain dispute business. But NAF went above and beyond in comments to ICANN regarding URSS, suggesting that perhaps UDRP has gradually moved away from what it was supposed to accomplish:

The URSS is supposed to deal with “abusive uses of trademarks where there is no genuine question as to the infringing or abusive use of a mark in a domain name.” Still, this is exactly the purpose of the UDRP. If the IRT reads the comments from the drafters of the UDRP, and looks at the items listed in UDRP Paragraph 4(c), in particular, it’s clear that the UDRP was not designed to deal with any situation where a Respondent might possibly have a claim to the domain name. Complainants have pushed, and Panelists have taken the opportunity, over time, to broaden the scope of the UDRP, but it started out as a mechanism only for clear cut cases of cybersquatting.

Read that again: the UDRP was not designed to deal with any situation where a Respondent might possibly have a claim to the domain name.

Just over the past week alone I’ve written regarding a number of such cases, such as Filta.com, RuggedSwitch.com, DEACOM.com, and Versa.com.

Read NAF’s entire response here (pdf).