Hi All,
Wendy Seltzer and I had a meeting with the Trademark Clearinghouse 
Independent Review Team (a fancy name for one person) in Marrakech and 
raised issues of concern, including:

- current over-expansion of the Trademark Clearinghouse (it is accepting 
applications it should not),
- current abuse of the Trademark Notice process (it should never become 
permanent or there will be a permanent "chilling effect" on registrants; 
the compromise and balance was a "short-term Trademark Notice" -- never 
an agreement for permanent), and
- never-ending pressure to extend the Trademark Clearinghouse and 
Trademark Notice to "legacy gTLDs" of .com, .org, .net -- despite that 
these mechanisms were specially created only for the New gTLDs and there 
is no reason or rationale to extend them (and such an extension would 
come with huge costs to speech and fair use).

/But we also told him that others in NCSG might want to meet with him. 
Do you have issues/concerns - should we meet with him together?  Feel 
free to write to me privately or publicly and we'll organize a group as 
needed...

/Best,
Kathy


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[NCSG-Discuss] FW: TMCH Independent Review Questionnaire Now 
Available
Date: 	Tue, 5 Apr 2016 13:59:40 +0000
From: 	Maryam Bakoshi <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: 	Maryam Bakoshi <[log in to unmask]>
To: 	[log in to unmask]




Dear SO/AC leaders,

To follow up on our previous message sent prior to ICANN 55, we wanted 
to thank all those who reached out and met with the Trademark 
Clearinghouse (TMCH) Independent Review Team to provide input on this study.

We are continuing with outreach and stakeholder discussions, and as part 
of this work, Analysis Group has developed a questionnaire to assess the 
opinions of various groups that interact with either all or some of the 
TMCH services. Given that feedback from interested stakeholders is 
extremely valuable to this review, we would greatly appreciate your 
assistance in helping us promote the TMCH questionnaire. Therefore, it 
would be fantastic if you could share the following link 
(http://www.analysisgroup.com/icann-trademark-clearinghouse/) via one or 
more of your communication channels (website, blog, e-mail, bulletin 
board, newsletter etc.) and encourage your members to complete the 
questionnaire.

As noted previously, ICANN is conducting an independent review of the 
TMCH, which was recommended by the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) 
in 2011 (see 
https://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/gac-comments-new-gtlds-26may11-en.pdf). 
The purpose of this study is to assess the effectiveness of the TMCH in 
combination with the areas that the Governmental Advisory Committee 
(GAC) specified for review, which include: (1) handling of non-exact 
matches to trademarks, (2) extension of the Trademark Claims 
notifications, and (3) impacts of the Claims services on the commercial 
watch services market.

This is intended as an informational study to support discussions on 
related Right Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) activities, such as the work 
of the Competition, Consumer Trust, and Consumer Choice Review Team 
(CCT-RT) and the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) review of 
all RPMs in all gTLDs Policy Development Process (PDP).

Thank you again for taking the time to consider our request, and please 
let us know if you have any questions that we can help address.

Best regards,

*Antonietta Mangiacotti*

Research Assistant

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>

Office: 310.578.8903

Mobile: 310.795.8543