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FINAL VERSION TO BE SUBMITTED IF RATIFIED

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FINAL DRAFT VERSION TO BE VOTED UPON BY THE ALAC

The A

ALAC Statement on Revised Rights Protection Mechanism (RPM)

The At-Large community appreciates the improvements made by ICANN in the revised Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements (RPM) released on 6 August 2013 (http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/trademark-clearinghouse/draft-rpm-requirements-06aug13-en.pdf). 

Under the revised Requirements for the Sunrise Registration, a new gTLD Registry Operator that “has implemented IDN variant registration policies for the TLD” MAY register the IDN variant(s) as far as the corresponding trademark data has been generated by the Trademark Clearinghouse.  This revision reflects the IDN user community’s persistent request on removal of the unreasonable restriction on the registration of the IDN variant(s) of a valid trademark data over the Sunrise Period. 

The ALAC has emphasized in its previous advice  (http://atlarge.icann.org/correspondence/correspondence-21may13-en.htm) that  that the At-Large Community firmly believes that “ICANN's Rights Protection Measures should treat the trademarks in any language or character set equally, the principle being that Internet users in any language community should be equally protected against confusion.”  The variant support of the Rights Protection Mechanism must thus have universal applicability and yield a consistent user experience for all users. 

Noting the SSAC opinion that “centralizing “centralizing variant generation and checking would bring consistency to the variants generated” (http://www.icann.org/en/groups/ssac/documents/sac-060-en.pdf), generated," we hereby advise ICANN to require the Trademark Clearinghouse to implement IDN variant policies itself to ensure the integrity and consistency of user experience across new gTLDs and across scripts.   

The option of relying on the TLD Registry Operator’s “IDN variant policies” has the disadvantage of resulting in differentiating IDN variant treatment for the same trademark across TLDs, which will cause inconsistent user experience as well as user confusion.  Furthermore, the revised requirements for Trademark Claims as they are currently formulated will serve only part of the global IDN user community (see Annex 1 A for elaboration).

ANNEX 1

Annex A: Why the Trademark Claims Requirement

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Serves Only Part of the Global IDN User Community

Under the revised Requirements for Trademark Claims, a Registry Operator that has established IDN variant policies for allocation of domain names in the TLD “must check all labels in a variant set against the Domain Name Label List for Trademark Claims before any domain names in the set are registered.”  This requirement serves the needs of only part of the global IDN community.  For example, it serves the needs of the Chinese script community, but not the needs of the Arabic script community.  [Note: For the purpose of this elaboration, an example focusing on the Arabic script is provided below to serve as an illustration of a script that is shared across multiple languages where languages where there is no cohesive cohesion in IDN Tables among them.  This  This case is applicable to other scripts in a similar situation such as Latin, Cyrillic, etcetera.]

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Requiring the Arabic script community to develop cohesive IDN Tables or Label Generation Rules (LGR) is not a realistic option in the short term.  The Arabic script is the second most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world after the Latin script.  It is used not only for the Arabic language, but also for non-Arabic languages such as Malay, Farsi, UrdhuUrdu, Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, and more.  The diversity of the global Arabic Script community is such that it will require time for them to agree on cohesive IDN Tables or Label Generation Rules (and agreement is not guaranteed).  As a basis for comparison, it should be noted that the Han script community, which comprises the Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages communities, required more than a year to agree on cohesive IDN Tables and Label Generation Rules.  The implementation of the Trademark Clearinghouse cannot wait for this longer-term solution as it is uncertain how long it would take to resolve the linguistic differences.  Nevertheless, all script communities should still be encouraged to develop cohesive IDN Tables and Label Generation Rules to address issues that will arise beyond the Trademark Claims period.

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