A global online arbitration service to combat "cybersquatting" - the bad faith registration of Internet addresses - has got off to a flying start with nearly 90 cases filed since it was set up in December.
The service, run by the World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, has reached decisions on disputed Internet addresses, or "domain names", in favour of the World Wrestling Federation, Stella D'oro Biscuit, a Nabisco affiliate and Telstra, the Australian telecommunications company.
The arbitration service, which enables companies to avoid costly lawsuits, aims to tackle obvious cases of people registering domain names in which they have no rights or legitimate interests, usually in the hope of making a profit by reselling the registration to the owner.
For a fee normally between $1,000 (€994) and $3,500 (€3,479), complaints are examined by panels of one or three experts, who are expected to come to a decision within 45 days. Unless the panel's judgment is challenged in court, domain name registrars are bound to implement it.
Among the cases pending are dior.org, easyjet.net, worldcup2002.com, jpmorgan.org, microsoft.org, alaskaairlines.org and dodialfayed.com. Although the US accounts for the bulk of the 89 cases filed so far, with 54 complainants and 52 respondents, some 30 countries are involved.
Mr Francis Gurry, director of the arbitration and mediation centre, said this week that the increasing rate of filings - 60 in February compared to 28 in January and one in December - reflected the market's growing confidence in the procedure and its "efficient and balanced" handling by the service.
The mandatory dispute resolution system was set up under the so-called uniform domain name dispute resolution policy adopted last August by Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which governs the generic top-level domains .com, .net and .org.
More difficult cases may still have to go through the courts.
More than 20,000 trademarks were registered in 1999 under the Madrid treaty on international registration of marks, equivalent to more than 240,000 national trademark registrations, the organisation said this week. At the end of last year, 64 countries were members of the Madrid Union. The latest country to join is Japan.
