You gotta love this planet. Here we have the first cybsquatter multiligual domain dispute - meanwhile non of these multiligual domains work yet in the dns. Maybe it's changed - correct me if I'm wrong. anyway - sometimes I feel like I live on a planet surrounded by drag queens carrying legal briefs - and it's all this ICANN UDRP sillyness that really drives that horror home to me. cheers and enjoy joe ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 10:16:20 -0500 From: Michael Sondow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: First Multilingual Cybersquatting Case Filed COMPUTERGRAM INTERNATIONAL: JANUARY 11 2001 + First Multilingual Cybersquatting Case Filed The World Intellectual Property Organization has received its first cybersquatting complaint over a domain name registered in a non-ASCII language, it emerged this week, highlighting the confusion over multilingual domain name registration. Sankyo Seiki Manufacturing Co Ltd, a Tokyo-based electronics company, said it has filed a complaint with WIPO under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy - the set of anti-cybersquatting rules developed by domain regulator ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The complaint alleges that an individual from Osaka, Japan, registered the Japanese-character equivalent to sankyo.com shortly after .com registry operator VeriSign Inc launched an Asian-language registration test-bed in mid-November. The test-bed took about 700,000 registrations in Korean, Japanese and Chinese in the first month of operation, but was criticized as premature by standards bodies, which have yet to come up with a way for non-English characters to be represented in the domain name system. The experiment has so far been successful because the way VeriSign chose to represent Asian characters in the registry. The company is using technology from i-DNS.net International Inc, which converts Asian characters into nonsensical ASCII strings. That means that while premium .com real estate like, for example, books.com have long gone, the Japanese equivalent, as represented by an ASCII string that would be gibberish in English, was still available. Therefore, a multilingual gold rush began, catalyzed by the fact that many of the participating registrars, Register.com Inc for example, provide free translation tools that allow an English speaker to register an Asian name, even if they have no knowledge of the language. While the Sankyo suit, which has not yet been published, is the first cybersquatting case presented to a UDRP arbitrator, it will certainly not be the last. VeriSign, in its rush to get multilingual registrations to market, decided against implementing a so-called "sunrise" period where only trademark holders can register their names. Each of registry operators for the new wave of top-level domains (.info and .pro for example), promised to implement sunrise periods in an apparent attempt to appease the intellectual property lobby at ICANN, which granted the registry contracts. VeriSign was under no such obligation under its long-standing .com, .org and .net registry contract. A spokesperson for VeriSign Global Registry Services said that under the agreements between VeriSign and the participating test-bed registrars, trademark holders are allowed to reclaim cybersquatted names merely by sending a letter to the registrar in question before the next phase of the test-bed gets underway. This would mean Sankyo may have been somewhat premature in its UDRP filing. The spokesperson also said that the decision to not use a sunrise period was made because "the UDRP would protect trademark holders before the resolution phase." "Resolution" is the phase of the test-bed to come at some unspecified future date when Asian domains will actually be able to start pointing to web sites and be used in email addresses. Currently the registrations are just sitting there in VeriSign-GRS's database. Taking registrations is the easy part, making them resolve to IP addresses is considerably more difficult, as it could involve not only upgrading the software on every name server on the internet, but every piece of client software too. ISPs that use BIND, the Berkley Internet Name Domain name server software, will probably have to patch it to be compatible with non-ASCII character sets, and browsers and email clients will have to be updated by users that want to type in Asian URLs or email addresses. Trademark holders that believe they have been cybersquatted in Asian languages and want to use the UDRP will have to pay WIPO, or one of the other three UDRP arbitrators, a fee of between $1,500 and $2,000 to challenge the registration. This puts the cost of protecting against cybersquatting in the hands of the injured party, rather than the registry. The VeriSign spokesperson estimates that full resolution could come before the second quarter, giving trademark holders about six months to get their names back before cybersquatters start using them. According to sources, the first stages of resolution will begin in the next couple of weeks, in a phased fashion.
