Transcript excerpt from 14 March 2011 ICANN public forum on trademarks & new gtld policy (full transcript here):
>>ROBIN GROSS: Thank you. My name is Robin Gross. I’m with I.P. Justice and the Noncommercial Users Constituency. However, I am speaking in my personal capacity.
I just wanted to let the board know that, in general, I support the board on all of its number 2s that it’s given on the GAC scorecard in response to the trademark issues. So I just want to focus my remarks on a couple of the points that I do have, just a few issues.
And the first is this issue of changing the URS to a URT, meaning changing the suspension to a transfer. I think it’s worth noting that as a member of the STI team, one of the arguments that we consistently heard coming from the IPC when they would ask for more things is, “Don’t worry. This is just a suspension, not a transfer. So don’t worry about it.” And so we would compromise. And so the entire community consensus was predicated upon this being a suspension and not a transfer.
And then it turns, they go and lobby the GAC to ask for it to be a transfer. So this is really not a fair way of community compromising or handling community compromise.
So that’s the first issue.
The second issue is the increase in scope to include all types of intellectual property rights. The STI team again took great care to make sure to narrow this only to trademarks, those that had substantive review. However, we see some indication that the board may increase this significantly to include not only unsubstantive trademarks, but all kinds of intellectual property rights, trade secrets, copyrights, pharmaceutical data. The list is extremely long of all the types of rights that this could suddenly — that this will suddenly incorporate if there isn’t some time and attention paid to this issue.
And the third issue that — well, let me just also say that allowing for these nonsubstantive and what we’ve heard described as imaginary trademarks is creating an incentive that is ripe for gaming. And I don’t think — gaming on behalf of the trademark owners. And I don’t think that’s an incentive that we want to bake into the policy.
And the other issue that I wanted to mention was, again, baking into the policies these presumptions of bad faith on behalf of registrants and losses of due process.
So when the presumption is, if somebody doesn’t respond in a certain period of time, well, therefore we can presume bad faith, I have serious problems with that.
So these are really the three big issues that I wanted to highlight, although I want to, again, preface my entire remarks with, in general, I support what the — how the board has handled the trademark issues, especially all of the number 2s that it has assigned.
Thank you.
>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Robin.