On 1 Nov 2014, at 1:49 am, Susan Kawaguchi <susank@fb.com> wrote:
Hi Volker and David,
Interesting that you would agree to some specific legal areas such as data protection and privacy but not intellectual property.
Do you think that ICANN, and the GNSO Council specifically, currently has a shortage of trademark lawyers involved in its processes that needs to be corrected? My 'teasing' was because asking for more expertise in the area might be taken to imply the ones we already have lack expertise, which I thought was a little funny coming from one of them - but I hasten to add that I do not think this is true, I think trademark lawyers absolutely should be involved in the our policy development processes, and there are already many who are, and who do a good job of bringing that expertise into our policy processes. The NomCom absolutely should be bringing us more intellectual property expertise IF that was an area in which we were currently lacking, but I do not think it is, nor is it likely to be. So my point isn't about the abstract value of intellectual property law, it is about the purpose of our direction to NomCom - I don't think it is a list purely of expertise that we'd like to have, I think it is a list of things that we'd like to have and currently are somewhat reliably lacking in. For example, I think it is absolutely crucial that council, and the GNSO generally, include people with a deep understanding of the registry and registrar business, but I wouldn't put that on the NomCom list, as the relevant stakeholder groups very reliably supply such people. Cheers David