At 09/11/2009 11:31 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

2009/11/9 Alan Greenberg <<mailto:alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca>alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> Â This is certainly an important issue, but your analysis of the work to date is not quite accurate, as there has been both the admission that such problems could exist, and that they will need to be dealt with.

It simply converned me that none of the questions from the Board to GNSO concerned protection for good-faith registrants. Â Sanctions for "abuse" of the URS (and let's be pragmatic, abuse is likely to be judged differently depending on who the beholder is)

Actually, this is part of the problem. Without a consistent definition we can't trust that it will be applied with any usefl consistency. Im my brief times to date working with the GNSO on "registrant abuse", all they were concerned with was abuse *by* (bad-faith) registrants.

Having clear guidelines for abuse also helps guide the panelists in acknowledging the purpose of the URS/UDRP process. Consumer confusion over brands -- not protecting monopoly control over names -- should be the primary interest.

 have yet to be discussed in the STI group (we have had only one meeting dedicated to the URS). However, both the IRT report and the staff proposal sets what I presume will be the base level of sanction: three occasions where complaints are abusive will bar the complainant from filing a URS for 1 year (abusive not yet defined).

The sanction is pointless if the definition is so vague that abuse will never judged to occur.

Has there ever been judgments (that have stood) that complainants have abused the UDRP since it started? Â NCSG has defined a set of sanctions which I am guessing will deemed to be too high by the group as a whole. Presumably the final outcome, if there is one, will be in the middle.

I wouldn't make that assumption. NCSG and At-Large positions have been completely ignored in other ICANN contexts, and Hong has also suggested that much of the NCSG sanctions are unreasonable. Are there certain specific parts of Kathy's sanction proposals that are worth pressing for?

To quote myself in a private e-mail with a Board member who has an interest in these things, in a conversation about the definition of "abuse", the mechanism by which a Complainant would be "held to have filed [an] abusive complaint", who does the judging: "... the lack of clarity here does make a bit of a mockery of trying to specify in detail what level of "abuse" results in what sanction." Alan