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
Office: 310.578.8903
Mobile: 310.795.8543