NAF ruling escapes UK court scrutiny

23/12/2002 

What was to been the first challenge a domain name arbitration ruling by ICANN in the UK courts has ended up in an out of court settlement. 

Back in July UK domain name registry Internetters issued High Court proceedings to prevent the transfer of a domain name, domainregistry.biz, to US firm DomainRegistry.com Inc. 

Internetters acted after what it claimed was a flawed decision by a one-member panel of the ICANN-appointed National Arbitration Forum (NAF) to strip it of the disputed domain. 

Paul Westley, co-founder of Internetters, explains: "We registered 'domainregistry.biz' when the new .biz domains became available as we thought it was descriptive of the services we offer and a strong generic name for use on the Internet. We had no idea that a small US company would challenge this on the basis of a trademark which it has not yet registered." 

NAF's decision was heavily affected by DomainRegistry.com's application to trademark the term domain registry despite the fact this was such a generic term for many similar businesses. Also its previous attempts to trademark the term had been turned down by the US Patent and Trademark Office. 

Another point of contention was DomainRegistry.com alleged refusal to abide by the conditions of the STOP (.biz registry Neulevel's Start Up Opposition Policy) process concerning the location of the dispute in the event of a challenge. This is known as 'Mutual Jurisdiction'. 

Details at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28676.html