Comments in Response to the Secretariat's Questionnaire on the Protection of Country Names in the Domain Name System
The State Intellectual Property Office
of The Republic of Croatia
Zagreb, 05th March 2002
Response to the Questionnaire on the
Protection of Country Names in the Domain Name System
In response to the Questionnaire on the protection of country names in the domain name system we, The State Intellectual Property Office of the Republic of Croatia, would like to submit our general comments and positions. We would also like to state that The Republic of Croatia very much appreciates the efforts made by WIPO in ensuring the protection of intellectual property rights and its fight against the abusive registration of domain names in relation to personal names, International Non-Proprietary Names for pharmaceutical substances (INNs), names of international governmental organizations (IGOs), geographical indications and trade names.
As far as the protection of country names in the domain name system is concerned, we support the idea of establishing a mechanism which would protect the names of the countries and their country codes in the following way:
(i) The names of the countries should be identified by reference to the United Nations Terminology Bulletin and the country codes by reference to ISO Standard 3166. Both the long and short names of countries should be protected.
(ii) Country names should be protected in official languages of each country (local names) and in the most commonly used languages (English, French, Spanish etc.)
(iii) Protection should be extended to all, both existing and future, gTLDs, as well as to ccTLDs.
(iv) The domain name registrants who lose their registrations due to the new mechanism of protection should be compensated in some way, but the ways in which this could be done should be the result of examining the possibilities arising from registration contracts.
(v) For domain names that are identical to country names we propose the absolute form of protection, through which the registration of such domain names would be cancelled. The disputes related to misleading variations could be dealt within a mechanism akin to the existing UDRP.
(vi) Protection should extend to both the exact country name and misleading variations.
(vii) We think that protection should be absolute - the registration of domain names identical to country names and their misleading variations should be refused.
We hope that our comments would help in establishing the best possible models for appropriate protection of the identifiers covered by the Second WIPO Process.
Hrvoje Junaevic, LL. B.
Acting Director General