[ga] IRT Final Report is an abomination and wholly unbalanced

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I was holding out hope that the IRT would actually take into account the public 
comments of the non-IP world and create a balanced report. We made extensive 
comments in good faith that reflected the needs of responsible registrants:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/irt-draft-report/msg00000.html
http://forum.icann.org/lists/irt-draft-report/msg00015.html
http://forum.icann.org/lists/irt-draft-report/msg00016.html

(the 3rd link in particular discussed a novel approach that would protect ALL 
registrants from new gTLD confusion at the top level in an elegant manner, and 
was superior to the rehash of old ideas produced by the IRT)

I just finished reading the final report and frankly it is an abomination, 
showing total disregard for balanced solutions that protect the rights of 
legitimate registrants. Trademark trolls who wish to reverse hijack valuable 
domain names would be cheering at this report, if it was implemented without 
significant changes.

The URS in particular is an extremist view of trademark rights, tilted in 
favour of IP interests compared to the UDRP and beyond what is protected or 
recognized by law and due process. It also obfuscates the dual requirement of 
BOTH bad faith use AND registration (there are lots of inconsistencies in the 
language that seek to weaken the standard to make it "OR" instead of "AND"). 
The level of defaults will be even higher than the UDRP simply because good 
faith registrants never receive actual notice of complaints. Even faxes were 
considered too expensive! A 1 page fax, using email-to-fax technology (so it 
can easily be automated by the URS provider) would cost less than $1 ANYWHERE 
in the world! The IRT team should try sending registered letters in a 
statistically valid sample size and measure how long it takes them to be 
delivered to different parts of the world -- it can be more than a week, even 
from the USA to Canada, let alone from Europe to Canada.
 And the URS was said to be a "higher burden" than the UDRP, yet no 
consideration was given to the creation date of the domain name! Restricting 
the URS to recently registered domains would have demonstrated that the IRT was 
showing balance, i.e. only wanting to cover "clear cut" cases of abuse. 
Frankly, the IRT team is demonstrating that their tactics and extreme positions 
can be even worse than those of the cybersquatters that they decry and detest.

I will do a detailed deconstruction of the final report in the coming weeks 
(there are more pressing comments required by the NTIA first), however simply 
re-read the comments that I and others submitted previously. They were 
completely ignored. 

Yours very truly,

George Kirikos
President
Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc.
http://www.leap.com/