Month: April 2003

Some RSS feeds pointing into list archives, updated every three hours: ALAC, GNSO Council. More feeds (including for the ALAC’s public comment addresses) are available from here.

Two valuable links from trademark.blog. WIPO has published a comic on copyright. “Buying the CD means listening to it is your only right”; copying without permission is compared to stealing a car. Matt (the guy who originally blogged this one) describes his state of mind after reading the comic as shell-shocked. BTW, this is the same organization which is currently asking ICANN to extend the UDRP to create new rights in IGO names and acronyms, and country names. (“And, by the way, please also scrap that pesky review of UDRP decisions in ordinary courts, while you’re at it.”) More on that soon.

On the “useful references” front, OECD has published a report which compares DNS administration (including trademark and WHOIS policies) throughout its member states.

Comments submitted to ALAC are now being properly archived.

… is not such a new idea, as this mailing list posting from 1999 demonstrates. A slightly modified version of the example configuration file in that message is what I use for the possible prototype of an ALAC comments site discovered and announced by Bret.

Louis Touton to the GNSO Council: At its meeting today, the ICANN Board unanimously adopted the GNSO Council’s 20 February 2003 recommendations on inter-registrar transfers of domain-name registrations. The recommendations will now enter an implementation phase.

Other topics: The board ratified a year’s worth of board meeting minutes, and funding for the nominating committee. That funding includes expenses associated with a face-to-face meeting of the Nominating Committee. Preliminary minutes of the meeting.

Two drafts for ALAC statements (still subject to discussion and revision; comments welcome): new gTLDs; WIPO2.

Some bookmarks about the work of the GNSO Council’s new gTLD “committee of the whole”: list archives; version 3 of the committee’s report. On yesterday’s Council call, all GNSO council members were encouraged to forward that report to their respective constituencies.

There also seemed to be agreement that pargraph 7 of that document should be presented to the board as the advice it asked for (see also this message from Vint Cerf), and that the rest should be presented as a summary of other discussions the council had on the new gTLD topic.

“Problems experienced with the registration of GATT.org […] which is used to provide misleading information to the public via a site that is deceptively similar to the official WTO site“ are cited as a prominent example in paragraph 147 of the WIPO2 report’s section on protection of the names and acronyms of International Intergovernmental Organizations in the DNS. The report was part of the process which lead to these recommendations currently under consideration at ICANN.

A summary of a conference talk given by the guys behind gatt.org which gives some more background information about the “problems” is available at LawMeme (scroll down to the end of the story; link through copyfight).

According to this story in the latest RISKS digest, Network Solutions is using a change of address database to update its customer data into which — allegedly — anyone can enter information without any kind of verification.

Yet another way to steal a domain name?

A handful of pictures from Rio de Janeiro, plus some from Bonn.