AT-LARGE GATEWAY
At-Large Regional Policy Engagement Program (ARPEP)
At-Large Review Implementation Plan Development
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The final draft version to be voted upon by the ALAC will be placed here before the vote is to begin.
FIRST DRAFT SUBMITTED
The At-Large community is very disappointed at the implementation
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model outlined by “Trademark Clearinghouse: Rights Protection
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Mechanism Requirements” (hereafter “Requirements’) published on April 6, 2013.
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Particularly, the model completely overlooks the critical issues of
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IDN variants with respect to trademark clearinghouse (TMCH) and as a
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result would seriously impact the public interest in the pertinent
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user communities.
According to the Requirements, *matching domain name labels will
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be generated for each Trademark Record in accordance with the
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Trademark Clearinghouse’s domain name matching rules*.
The matching rules at the TMCH obviously, however, fail to take
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into account the trademarks in IDN scripts involving variants, although
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the variant issues had been raised by the language community experts at
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the Implementation Assistant Group (IAG).
Variant matching is actually critical for certain language communities.
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Take Chinese for example, where a trademark holder merely registers
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a simplified word-mark but not its traditional equivalence, there will
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only be one trademark record generated in the TMCH. Since the new
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gTLD registries are obliged to offer sunrise services and trademark claims
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for the trademarks recorded in the TMCH, only that simplified word-mark will
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be eligible for sunrise registration and trademark claim services and
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leaves the traditional equivalence open for cybersquatting. Since both writings
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of the word-mark are deemed identical in the Chinese community and
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few trademarks are registered in both writings, ruling out the un-
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registered writing would make TMCH completely useless to Chinese trademarks.
What is even more striking is that the Requirements specifically
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prohibits any registry from implementing *variant or bundling rules* and
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allocating domain names *under such variant or bundling rules prior to
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the conclusion of the Sunrise Period.* Such restriction actually excludes any solution for IDN
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trademarks involving variants to be accommodated in the sunrise period at the
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TLD level, even though a registry is willing fix the variants through
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its registration management and at its own costs.
Trademarks have very important function of safeguarding public interests
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by identifying the source of goods or services. The malfunctioned TMCH
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design would cause serious public confusion and market chaos. Although at-
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large community never supports over-extensive trademark measures, ICANN
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should treat all the trademarks equally, irrespective of the characters of
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the trademarks, and protect the users in all language communities
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from confusion equally.
The At-Large community has made the statement on the Trademark
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Clearinghouse (TMCH) in September 2012, in which at-large community concerns that
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the design of TMCH model that uniformly applies to all the gTLD registries,
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irrespective of their difference, may not provide the tailored
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services that are really needed by the new gTLD registries. At-large
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community suggested that “more open and flexible model deserves further exploration.”
The Chinese Internet user community, dating back to October 2011,
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suggested that IDN-script trademarks involving variants should be taken into
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account in the TMCH services and ICANN consider adopting community-based
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solution to address this issue. Many other language communities shared the views
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of Chinese community.
Unfortunately, ICANN has been deaf to the user community’s feedback
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and inputs and moves steadily toward the centralized, inflexible
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and variants-unfriendly TMCH. At-large community, therefore, strongly
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suggests that ICANN support community-based TLD-bottom-up solution for
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TMCH implementation and address the IDN variant issue before TMCH provides
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the services to the new gTLD registries.
