The whole tone of the paper is about “Sunrise” rather than “intellectual property protection.”  It presumes that the only mechanisms that have been used are derivations of Sunrise.  It also presumed that IP Owners should have first dibs at domain names in every TLD and the only thing we are evaluating are processes to make sure that is always the case.  For example, .biz had an IP claims process.  It was not an alternative to Sunrise in that it was not an alternative mechanism to give IP Owners the names.  It was an alternative IP protection mechanism that gave applicants notice of claims by IP Owners to the names.  It in no way guaranteed that IP Owners would get the name, only that IP Owners would have notice that if they got the name, they could be subject to challenge. As an IP attorney, I believed then as I do now, that that was the only system that acted in accordance with the intent and spirit of the IP laws of most of the word. 

 

IP Laws do not give brand owners rights in gross to their trademarks in every class of goods and services.  Those laws do not guarantee that anyone else cannot use those marks.  All IP Laws do is put others on notice that if someone third party has IP rights in a mark and your use of the mark is confusingly similar, then you could be found to have infringed the third party’s marks.  It is up to the IP Owner then to enforce its own IP rights.  As a registry, we should not be in a position for a number of reasons to automatically give existing IP owners domain names, especially when there can be other uses of that IP for purposes which are not confusingly similar to the uses that the IP owner makes of the names.  We, as registries, are not their enforcers of IP rights.  That is and should always be the IP Owner’s job and not ours.

 

Again, I am an IP Owners, and one that has implemented other IP Protection schemes other than Sunrise.  The fact that Sunrise has been forced on .us, .eu and other domains, should not set the bad precedent for other TLDs.

 

Sorry for the long note, but I believe this WG TOR sets the tone for an assumption that the Sunrise must be implemented in all TLDs.  This is not surprising given the source of the TOR.  That said, please see my revisions: