ICANN's "Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy"– Causes and (Partial) Cures
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ICANN's "Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy"– Causes and (Partial) Cures A. Michael Froomkin Professor, University of Miami School of Law http://www.law.tm DRAFT Sept. 11, 2001 Subject to change Please check with author before quoting or citing This document at http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/udrp.pdf Contents Pre-History of the UDRP ............................................................ 5 The White Paper ............................................................. 12 The WIPO Process ........................................................... 14 WIPO’s Final Report ......................................................... 19 Leveraging the DNS ................................................... 20 Scope ............................................................... 21 ‘Administrative’ Process ................................................ 22 Substantive rules ...................................................... 23 Similarity ............................................................ 23 'Rights or Legitimate Interests' ........................................... 24 Bad Faith ............................................................ 27 Offers to Sell. ......................................................... 27 Commercial Confusion ................................................. 28 Repeat Players ........................................................ 28 Unfair Competition .................................................... 28 Meta questions ........................................................ 29 The RDNH Problem ................................................... 30 Deeply Flawed Procedures .............................................. 30 ICANN's UDRP ................................................................... 31 Criteria for Transfer .......................................................... 33 Procedural Problems .......................................................... 44 Selection and Composition of Tribunal ..................................... 45 Issues of Notice and Computation of Time .................................. 46 Asymmetric Access to Courts to 'Review' UDRP ............................. 49 Fixing the UDRP’s Procedural Shortcomings .......................................... 56 Basic Fairness ............................................................... 57 Removing Potentially Biased Arbitrators ................................... 57 Removing Cases from Potentially Biased Providers ........................... 57 Leveling the Playing Field. .............................................. 58 Finding a RDNH Prohibition with Teeth .................................... 59 Proof and Decisions .......................................................... 61 Allocating the Burden of Proof ........................................... 61 The Problem of Settlement Negotiations and Solicited Offers of Sale ............. 62 Special Rules Needed for Allegations of Common Law Marks .................. 63 UDRP Decisions Should Be Final Within the System ......................... 63 Time and Computation of Time ................................................. 63 Notice and Attachments ................................................. 63 Removal of NAF ‘Sandbag’ Rule ......................................... 65 Helping Respondents Find an Arbitrator .................................... 65 Special Rules for Default Judgments? ...................................... 65 Court review ................................................................ 66 Ensuring Even Unequal Access to Court .................................... 66 Technical Amendments ................................................. 67 The Language of the Agreement ................................................. 68 Auditing for Quality and Fairness ......................................... 68 Summary and Conclusion ........................................................... 70 Credits, Disclosures ................................................................. 76 Trademark law is organized around a set of objectives and assumptions that map badly onto the Internet. Trademark law is predominantly organized around sectoral, geographic, and national principles. In contrast, the Internet is defiantly ignorant of national borders.1 This tension has spawned a number of legislative and quasi-public responses designed in some cases to attempt to harmonize the two regimes, but more often to bring the Internet into conformity with trademark law. Of these, probably the most ambitious--and surely one of the most flawed and unfair--is the "Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy" (UDRP2) adopted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers3 (ICANN) to provide a mandatory arbitration-like process to regulate disputes over domain name registrations by alleged "cybersquatters,"4 that is people who register domain names in order to resell them at a profit to the owner of a corresponding trademark. The UDRP is worth examining in detail because it is being touted as a model for e-commerce dispute settlement by industry spokespersons and policy entrepreneurs5 and soon may be required 1See, e.g., A. Michael Froomkin, The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage (book chapter) in BORDERS IN CYBERSPACE 129 (Brian Kahin and Charles Nesson, eds.) (1997), available online http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/arbitr.htm. 2Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (October 24, 1999), http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp-policy-24oct99.htm [Hereinafter cited as UDRP]. 3Arguably, ICANN itself could be said to be a by-product of this collision. For discussions of ICANN see A. Michael Froomkin, Wrong Turn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route around the APA and the Constitution, 50 DUKE L.J. 17 (2000), available online http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/icann.pdf (critiquing formation and use of ICANN as a means to avoid public rulemaking); Jonathan Weinberg, ICANN and the Problem of Legitimacy, 50 DUKE L.J. 187 (2000), available online http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?50+Duke+L.+J.+187 . 4Articles discussing related issues include Froomkin, supra note 3; A. Michael Froomkin, Semi-Private International Rulemaking: Lessons Learned from the WIPO Domain Name Process, in CHRISTOPHER T. MARSDEN (ED), REGULATING THE GLOBAL INFORMATION SOCIETY 211 (2000), available online http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tprc99.pdf (critiquing procedures used by World Intellectual Property Organization to contribute to private lawmaking). 5E.g. Juliana Greunwald, Intellectual Property Orrganization Stumped, Interactive Week, Feb. 1, 2001, http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2681274,00.html (noting speech by WIPO Assistant Director General Francis Gurry praising UDRP as model); [reference to Hague convention discussion; EU B2C arbitration proposals]; Brian Krebs, Regulators Would Do Well to Mimic ICANN—White House, at http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/148011.html (Apr. 25, 2000) (summarizing a speech by 1 by treaty. The U.S. Department of Commerce recently lauded the UDRP as "an efficient, inexpensive procedure for the resolution of disputes."6 Other governments also have endorsed the UDRP in principle,7 and at least twenty-one apply the UDRP to registrations in their domestic country-code top-level domains.8 Many academic commentators also have praised the UDRP,9 although some have been more critical.10 Most worryingly, the latest draft of the intellectual property DoC General Counsel Andrew Pincus arguing that “[t]he federal government could put an end to its numerous Internet regulatory headaches if it approached industry with the same type of cooperation shown . under the aegis of ICANN”); Masanobu Katoh, ICANN—A Model for International Organizations in the 21st Century, at http://www.mkatoh.net/speech/icann_katoh072000-e.ppt (July 2000) (archiving PowerPoint slides from a speech made by ICANN board member-elect arguing that ICANN could be a model for global rulemaking in the twenty-first century). 6U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration Annual Report 2000, http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/annualrpt/2001/2000annrpt.htm. 7See WIPO, ccTLD Best Practices for the Prevention and Resolution of Intellectual Property Disputes (Version 1: June 20, 2001), http://ecommerce.wipo.int/domains/cctlds/bestpractices/bestpractices.html (endorsing UDRP as an "excellent reference model and a valuable starting basis" for design of online dispute resolution). 8See UDRPlaw.net, ccTLDs and International Domain Name Dispute Resolution, http://www.udrplaw.net/cctldDisputes.htm . 9Most of this work is either frankly results-oriented, focuses on an idealized version of the UDRP, or limits itself to the substance of the rules rather than confronting the UDRP’s serious procedural failures. Examples include Shamnad Basheer, Establishing Rights/Legitimate Interests in a Domain Name: Cyber Squatters Get Creative, [2001] C.T.L.R. 1; Leah Phillips Falzone, Playing the Hollywood Name Game in Cybercourt: The Battle over Domain Names in the Age of Celebrity-Squatting, 21 LOYOLA OF LA ENT. L. REV. 289 (2001) (praising UDRP as tool for celebrities to wrest "their" names from cybersquatters); Patrick L. Jones, Protecting Your “SportsEvent.com:” Athletic Organizations and the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, 5 W.VA. J. L. & TECH. 2.1 (April 16, 2001) http://www.wvu.edu/~wvjolt/Arch/Jones/Jones.htm; Jason M. Osborn, Effective and Complementary Solutions