Veronica Bailey looks at advances in domain name disputes—10 years on
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) held a conference in Geneva to mark the 10th anniversary of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure (UDRP) last month.
The UDRP was designed to address cyber-squatting, providing trade mark and service mark owners with a mechanism for the resolution of disputes over domain names.
The complainant under the UDRP has to establish: that the disputed domain is identical or confusingly similar to the trade mark or service mark in which he has rights; that the registrant of the domain name has no rights or legitimate interests in the domain name; and that the domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.
The first case filed, World Wrestling v Bosman (D99-0001), involved straightforward cybersquatting. Since then WIPO has administered over 16,000 cases filed under the UDRP.
Today, there are over 180m domain name registrations and their use has changed significantly. Domain names are now not only used by owners of trade marks or service marks, but also as unique online identifiers for a host
