Comments in Response to the Secretariat's Questionnaire on the Protection of Country Names in the Domain Name System
February 28, 2002
International Bureau of the World Intellectual Property Organization
Re: ANNEX to Circular C.6635
Questionnaire on the Protection of Country Names in the Domain Name System
Dear Sirs,
We refer with thanks to your letter dated December 19, 2001 with its enclosure concerning the above captioned matter.
As requested, we would like to submit our comments on a questionnaire on the Protection of Country Names System as follows;
i. How should the name of a country be identified (for example, by reference to the United Nations Terminology Bulletin, ISO Standard 3166, or by some other method) and should both the long and short names of countries be protected?
- We think two letter country codes (i.e. ISO 3166 alpha-2 country code elements), three letter country codes (i.e. ISO 3166 alpha-3 country code elements) and short names of countries which are listed in an Official Linguistic Publication of the United Nations as the Names of its Member States should be protected.
ii. In what languages should country names be protected?
- In the first place, official language which the country in concern requests (in case of Japan, Japanese, for instance), and English, Spanish, French and German as well.
iii. To what domains should any protection be extended (for example, to all, both existing and future, gTLDs, only to future gTLDs, also to ccTLDs, etc.) ?
- Protection should extend to all existing and future gTLD. As for ccTLD, it should be left to the policy of each ccTLD administrator and the government of the country concerned.
iv. How should any alleged acquired rights be treated?
- Alleged acquired rights should be treated separately and the policy which will be mentioned below shall not have retrospective effect. We think protection of country names should be dependent upon showing of bad faith in case of alleged acquired rights.
v. What mechanism should be used to implement protection (for example, the UDRP or some other mechanism)?
- The UDRP should apply, however, country names should be protected absolutely without a requirement of showing bad faith as will be mentioned below, so the UDRP needs to be amended accordingly as far as country names are concerned. We also think that placing a priority period for the governments who wish to register their own country names from now to reserve the domain names would be necessary.
vii. Should any protection extend to the exact country name only or also to misleading variations?
- We think a protection should extend the exact country name only.
viii. Should protection be absolute or should it be dependent upon a showing of bad faith?
- Protection should be absolute. In view of the flexible nature of domain names, which run around the borderless cyber world freely, we think country names should be protected universally in the domain name system although there is no universal standard concerning protection of country names in a real world. In this context, it would be necessary to regulate the registration of country names in the domain name system drastically to a certain extent and we think the protection should be absolute.
Yours sincerely,
Masaaki OGURA, Vice-President
Japan Patent Attorneys Association