NIPC News

  Jane Lambert About 30 years ago, I attended a workshop on the arbitration of intellectual property disputes. The speakers included  Dr Francis Gurry  and His Honour Peter Ford.  At that time, Dr Gurry was an Australian academic who had written a rather good book on the law of confidence . He went on to become Director-General of the WIPO. Peter Ford was the first judge of the Patents County Court which was the predecessor to the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court ("IPEC"). Two alternative dispute resolution services were set up as a result of that workshop.  One was an arbitration and mediation panel attached to the Patents County Court under the leadership of Prof. Bryan Niblett.  I was a founder member.   I am not sure whether we ever had a case,  Certainly, nothing was referred to me and the panel was disbanded after a few years.   The other was the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") Arbitration and Mediation...

WIPO Head Office in Geneva Photo Jane Lambert © 2006 Jane Elizabeth Lambert: all rights reserved Jane Lambert Since 2005 the European Union has had its own top level domain space for businesses, institutions and individuals domiciled in any of the EU or EFTA mmber states.  The best known users of that domain space are the EU institutions such as the European Union itself (http://europa.eu/), the Court of Justice of the European Union (https://curia.europa.eu) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (https://euipo.europa.eu) but there are others who have registered ".eu" domain names. The agreement to register an ".eu" domain name requires complaints by trade mark owners over the registration of the domain name to be referred to a panel appointed by a dispute resolution service provider chosen by the complainant. Up to now, the Czech Arbitration Court  has been the only dispute resolution service provider but from tomorrow it wi...

Jane Lambert When you key in the name of a business or one of its products or services into the address of a modern browser like Chrome the chances are that it will take you to where you want to go. Increasingly frequently, however. such an exercise will lead you to a landing page with sponsored links and searches including links to products or services of the business you are trying to reach. Occasionally, it will even lead to a spoof site that looks and feels like a genuine site but if a user tries to order goods or services through it or simply leaves an email address all sorts of annoying things can happen of which serial spamming is probably the least to worry about. The reason why internet users are waylaid in this way is that it is very cheap and easy to register a domain name that is the same or similar to a business name or trade mark . Now registering a domain name that is the same as, or similar to, someone else's trade mark or business name without justif...

WIPO head office, Geneva Author Melatron Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert In my experience as a domain name dispute resolution panellist for the WIPO as well as a member of the Bar who has advised and settled pleadings for both complainants and respondents, most domain name disputes are straightforward. Moreover, most complaints are decided in favour of the complainant.  Of all the cases that have been referred to WIPO since 1999, some 21,399 or nearly 86.0% have resulted in a transfer to the complainant and 407 or 1.6% in a cancellation. A complaint has been denied in only 3,086 cases making 12.4% of the total (see  Case Outcome (Consolidated): All Years   on the WIPO website). Those figures are hardly surprising as it is rare for a complaint to be defended and even rarer for a response to disclose any merit. It can therefore be said with some confidence that most panellists' decisions are likel...

WIPO Head Office Photo Wikipedia Jane Lambert Last Wednesday I attended the annual domain name panellists' meeting at the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") 's head office in Geneva. The meeting normally takes place on the third Monday of October but this year it was postponed until December. The WIPO is one of five domain name dispute resolution service providers that have been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN")  for the resolution of disputes between trade mark owners and those who have registered domain names. The other service providers are the Arab Centre for Dispute Resolution , the  Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre , the Czech Arbitration Court Arbitration Centre for Internet Disputes  and the National Arbitration Forum . By a memorandum of understanding between the US Department of Commerce and ICANN dated 25 Nov 1998 the US government entrust...