On 07/16/2009 05:11 AM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
Someone asked this specific question& Jonathan Cohen, Senior Partner at Shapiro Cohen replied that this was false: according to him, the ICANN bylaws& principles mention protection of Intellectual Property& Marks, and that therefore, the IRT's proposals fall completely *in line* with ICANN's *core mission*.
Jonathan was on ICANN's board of directors when I was. Jonathan, who can be very friendly and congenial on many things, is solidly behind ICANN as an intellectual property protection cop. But does that assertion make it so? ICANN can put anything it wants into its mission statement. (Have you seen the ICANN mission statement generator: http://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/mission-generator.html ) It is revealing to look at what ICANN says, particularly to governments, in more private places. In ICANN's United States tax filings ICANN says nothing about trademarks and tracks it statement of purpose very close to the mantra of technical coordination for the purpose of maintaining technical stability. It is also useful to look at ICANN's statements to courts in which ICANN argues that it is merely a vehicle of technical coordination. There is nothing "technical coordination" about protecting trademarks from people who use words to communicate with one another. ICANN is viewed by the intellectual property protection industry (an industry not to be confused with the intellectual property *creation* industry) as a pliant tool to obtain trademark protective rules without the cost and effort, not to mention the delay, of trying to get national legislatures to enact laws of that nature. And ICANN provides a way to throw trademark-vs-domain name disputes into a high-speed forum, one that arguably lacks due process for the accused domain name holder. (This latter aspect I've seen myself. I am a member of the California Bar and part of its Intellectual Property section. I have been to meetings in which various attorneys suggested ways to bluff an accused domain name holder out of his/her name by throwing the issue into the ICANN UDRP meat grinder.) In addition, one must ask, from whence comes this authority to be the internet's trademark cop? There is no delegation of such authority from any government, most notably not from the US Dept of Commerce's NTIA agency, which, by the way, has no statutory power to endow that kind of trademark cop powers onto ICANN. So we see that ICANN's trademark policeman's badge has no more meaning than a plastic badge found in a child's breakfast cereal box. --karl--