When I first started my research on legal aspects of domain names about five years ago (the result is available here) I had the feeling that I was beating a dead horse. The U.S. Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) was already up and running for about three years, the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) of ICANN too. Many people had the feeling that the game is over for cybersquatters.
A WIPO report published yesterday covering 2006 proved me wrong. WIPO speaks of an increase of 25% in the number of disputes over domain names brought before its dispute resolution panel last year. Once, I thought that the proliferation of generic Top-Level-Domains (have already heard of .mobi and .travel?) would discourage trademark holders from registering multiple variations of their mark under every possible generic TLD. Why? Simply because it would become too burdensome and expensive, almost like the administrative procedure of keeping the trademark registration itself. I was proven wrong again. According to the WIPO summary, more generic-TLDs means more disputes, not less.
According to WIPO, rightholders are particularly concerned about the practices of using computer software to automatically register expired domain names, domain names “parking” on pay-per-click portal sites and the option to register names free-of-charge for a five-day ‘tasting’ period. Looks like the future of legal specialists in the area is bright, particularly in a multi-language environment that supports non-Latin characters composing gTLD. Only last week, ICANN announced success in experimenting the introduction of the so-called internationalized top-level domains (IDN). No impact on the root name servers could be detected.
What’s the moral in the tale? I’m not sure. I only ask myself whether people would still be so eager about filing cybersquatting complaints if we had 200 gTLDs in 100 languages. Wouldn’t make sense, would it? Am I wrong again?