[process2-comments] RFC-1

 Name: Christopher Stewart Organization: Bookkeeping.com Position: Director I firmly believe that, in opposition to the statements made by the WIPO, the current Domain Dispute Resolution system has not been "successful". In essence this system has been unreparably damaging to the maintenance of free speech and other civil iberties that the WIPO shoul dbe in support of, ie. the decision regarding Corinthians.com. Overall, the system has lacked consistency amongst arbiter rulings and has demonstrated an unusal weighted favor towards complaintants. No fair minded person would argue that Microsoft.net does not infringe upon a trademark, however, statements within rulings such as "not in the best interest of the internet", or "purely to make a profit" are unsatisfactory to permit the "reverse-hijacking" of domains. The scope of the UDRP does not require broadening, much less the territory that the WIPO will now arbitrate over. The dispute resolution policy needs to be redefined and assessed as to its fairness and accuracy. Currently, domain registrars are not participating in the facilitation of secondary market exchanges to encourage the selling of domains, as well, they are providing complete service packages such as escrow. However, ICANN and the WIPO have dismissed these business models and yet focus on someone who owns a generic domain that may or may not be confusingly simialr with a registered trademark anywhere in the world. Now, the proposal to expand to geographical locations and celebrity names compounds the problems already facing domain name owners. What is wrong with owning a domain and wanting to sell it if the domain is generic? How can the WIPO support case rulings such as Crew.com, where anyone in their right mind would not confuse visiting crew.com and not seeing JT Crew clothing. So what if the owner may have or may not have solicited the sale of the domain to JT Crew. This is not an identical trademark and noone would believe the claim that JT Crew should be located at crew.com. Please, the WIPO is losing a trememndous amount of confidence from the INternet community. We are discouraged and angered by the lack of wisdom and substance to these rulings. We are in favour of some system to handle these disputes but this system must be fair and understanding. It is not as simple as matching equations to answers. Prior to expanding this process to include the proposed categories, I call for an independant audit of the to-date rulings to judge if this process has indeed been succesfu. If you look at a majority of the rulings, the repsondants have frequently ignored WIPO decisions and taken the matter to court. Thus, "success" has cost the original complaintant more money and the respondant has been forced to incur a larger cost due to ignorance of the arbitration panel. Sincerely, Chris Stewart