Comments re: protecting the rights of others in the new gTLD process

["Cordell, Lori" <lcordell@xxxxxxx>]

Please accept these general comments relevant to protecting the rights
of others in the new gTLD process.

 

There should be a quick and inexpensive process that precedes the
dispute process whereby one with legitimate or arguable rights to a
domain can protect its rights by having a gTLD declared "unavailable"
(either temporarily or indefinitely and quickly and inexpensively).
This is necessary because once an application is submitted, even one
with legitimate rights to a domain will have to go through an extremely
expensive dispute process in order to protect its legitimate rights to a
domain.  Moreover, it may be burdensome to continuously monitor
applications to see whether anyone is trampling on intellectual property
rights when requesting domains.     

 

In addition, ICANN should comply with orders/injunctions issued by
courts of competent jurisdiction, no matter when those
orders/injunctions are issued.  In other words, companies should
continue to be able to have their intellectual property rights declared
by courts of competent jurisdiction, and ICANN should respect those
decisions, no matter whether the decision comes before or after ICANN
has issued a gTLD (e.g., if ICANN issued ".mickeymouse" to someone other
than Disney because Disney failed to object, and Disney subsequently
obtained an federal court injunction regarding the use of .mickeymouse,
then ICANN should disable the domain.)