[gnso-igo-ingo-qc] Qualification Criteria Group - Shortlisting/Prioritization

[Kiran Malancharuvil <kmalancharuvil@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Qualification Criteria Group Members,

As per Thomas' email below, please send your input regarding 
Shortlisting/Prioritization of the Qualification Criteria that the group has 
developed.  

As group leaders, we submit the following preliminary opinions regarding the 
Qualification Criteria:  

The most objective, and useful criterion to the inquiry is the existence of 
national laws or treaties that prohibit the unauthorized use of the 
words/designations in question.  

We also feel that "status" is an appropriate, objective, inquiry, as long as 
the language is changed to "not-for-profit status" rather than "charitable" 
status, which may be misleading.  

We do not believe that the following are useful inquiries for the ultimate 
purpose of this discussion:

        Recognized relationship with countries/IGOs/INGOs
        Work provides services to a number of countries
        Recognized relationship with services to the public/individuals
        Organizations serve a public good
        Organizations can use RPMs
        Organizations communicate directly with the public
        Membership composition
        Years in existence

While some of these items provide supportive reasons or benefits justifying 
protection, and various IGOs and INGOs satisfy a number of these items, they 
are not as objective as national laws or treaties are as qualification 
criteria.  

Please provide your comments as soon as possible.  


Best regards,

Jim Bikoff, David Heasley and Kiran Malancharuvil

Kiran J. Malancharuvil
Silverberg, Goldman & Bikoff, L.L.P.
Georgetown Place
1101 30th Street NW, Suite 120
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 944-3307 - office
kmalancharuvil@xxxxxxxxx

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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gnso-igo-ingo@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-gnso-igo-ingo@xxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Thomas Rickert
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 2:31 PM
To: gnso-igo-ingo@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: [gnso-igo-ingo] preparation of the next call


All,
in preparation of the next call, I would like to remind you of the next steps:

Ideally, the sub-teams will have discussed the contents of the respective 
spreadsheets and achieved two results:

- Shortlisting

Please identify, if you can, arguments or proposals that can be deleted because 
they do not help us in finding a solution. 

To give you an example: In my view, there was consensus or at least a vast 
majority of the participants found that putting the designations in question on 
the reserved names list would not be the way to go for various reasons. As a 
consequence, the line in the spreadsheet dealing with the reserved names list 
would not make it to the shortlist and could be marked deleted (see Protections 
sheet, line 4). 

We would still write a few lines about points that have been eliminated during 
the process of shortlisting, but by narrowing down the options, we will be able 
to focus on the relevant points.

- Priorization 

Please try to prioritize the points that have made it to the shortlist. I am 
not sure whether this is possible in all areas, but it would be helpful to find 
out whether the sub-groups are able to identify points that are more and those 
who are less relevant. 

An example might be that - at least this was my recollection of last week's 
call - the organizations seeking protection felt that harm to the global public 
interest (Nature of the Problem spreadsheet line 9)  was deemed a most 
important point while the issue of cost of defensive registration (same 
spreadsheet line 4) seemed to be discussed more controversially. 

Hopefully, we will be able to discuss the outcome of your discussions on 
Wednesday. 

Please submit your feedback to Berry by the COB on Tuesday so he can 
incorporate your work into a single document. As we plan to migrate from 
spreadsheet to text format, your feedback is most welcome in text format.

Should we not hear from you, we will discuss some hand-picked questions during 
the call to advance our discussions.

As indicated during the call, the plan is to write a report on the basis of the 
feedback we have after the call and have that ready for the call next week. 

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thomas