ICM hires Fausett to help with YouPorn antitrust case

ICM Registry has hired new lawyers to help it fend off the antitrust lawsuit filed against it by YouPorn owner Manwin Licensing.
Gordon & Rees senior partner Richard Sybert is taking over as lead counsel in the case, which relates to the launch of .xxx last year.
Notably, the new team includes long-time ICANN legal expert Bret Fausett of Internet.Pro, who represented the Coalition For ICANN Transparency in its antitrust case against ICANN and Verisign.
That’s a bit of a coup for ICM. Manwin’s recent legal arguments have relied heavily on the antitrust precedents Fausett helped set in the CFIT case.
Gordon & Rees replaces Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr as ICM’s outside counsel, due to the recent departure of Wilmerhale’s ICANN guru and ICM defender, Becky Burr.
Burr joined Neustar as its chief privacy officer in May.
Manwin sued ICM and ICANN last October, arguing that the launch of .xxx was little more than a shake-down.
Earlier this month, a California District Court judge ruled that ICANN is not immune from competition law and that the litigation can proceed.
The case will turn in part on the question of whether there’s a market for “defensive registrations” under competition law and whether ICANN and ICM illegally exploited it.

What’s wrong with Melbourne IT’s new anti-cybersquatting plan?

Genuine question.
Melbourne IT, the Aussie registrar with the increasingly vocal brand-protection focus, has come up with a new scheme for protecting super-famous brands after new gTLDs start to launch.
It draws on elements of the abandoned Globally Protected Marks List, ICM Registry’s Sunrise B policy, .CO Internet’s launch program, and various recent demands from the intellectual property community.
It’s called the paper Minimizing HARM (pdf), where HARM stands for High At-Risk Marks.
The title may set off grammatical alarm bells, but the rest reads like the least-unreasonable proposition for protecting big brands from cybersquatters that I’ve come across in a long time.
What I like about it is that it’s actually contemplating ways to prevent gaming from the outset, which is something the IP lobby hardly ever seems to do when it demands stronger rights protection mechanisms.
The idea calls for the forthcoming Trademark Clearinghouse to flag a narrow subset of the trademarks in its database as High At-Risk Marks that deserve special treatment.
Melbourne IT has organizations such as PayPal and the Red Cross in mind, but getting on the list would not be easy, even for famous brands.
First, companies would have to prove they’ve had trademark protection for the brand in three of ICANN’s five geographic regions for at least five years — already quite a high bar.
Implemented today, that provision could well rule out brands such as Twitter, which is an obvious high-risk cybersquatting target but might be too young to meet the criteria.
Dictionary words found in any of UN’s six official languages would also be banned, regardless of how famous the brand is. As the paper notes, that would be bad news for Apple and Gap.
Companies would also have to show that their marks are particularly at risk from phishing and cybersquatting.
Five successful UDRP complaints or suspensions of infringing domains by a “top ten registrar” would be enough to demonstrate this risk.
But that’s not all. The paper adds:

In addition to meeting the minimum criteria above, the High At-Risk Mark will need to obtain a minimum total points score of 100, where one point is awarded for each legal protection in a jurisdiction, and one point is awarded for each successful UDRP, court action, or domain registrar suspension undertaken in relation to the mark.

That appears to be setting the bar for inclusion high enough that an Olympic^TM pole-vaulter would have difficulty.
Once a brand made it onto the HARM list, it would receive special protections not available to other brands.
It would qualify for a “Once-off Registration Fee”, pretty much the same as ICM’s .xxx Sunrise B, where you pay once to block your exact-match domain and don’t get pinged for renewal fees every year.
Any third parties attempting to register an available exact-match would also have to have two forms of contact information verified by the gTLD registry before their names resolved.
The Trademark Claims service – which alerts mark owners when somebody registers one of their brands – would run forever for HARM-listed trademarks, rather than just for the first 60 days after a gTLD goes into general availability.
The always controversial Uniform Rapid Suspension service would also get tweaked for HARM trademarks.
Unless the alleged cybersquatter paid the equivalent of a URS filing fee (to be refunded if they prevail) their domains would get suspended 48 hours after the complaint was filed.
I’m quite fond of some of the ideas in this paper.
If ICANN is to ever adopt a specially protected marks list, which it has so far resisted, the idea of using favorable UDRP decisions as a benchmark for inclusion – which I believe Marque also suggested to ICANN back in February – is attractive to me.
Sure, there are plenty of dumb UDRP decisions, but the vast majority are sensible. Requiring a sufficiently high number of UDRP wins – perhaps with an extra requirement for different panelists in each case – seems like a neat way of weeding out trademark gamers.
The major problem with Melbourne IT’s paper appears to be that the system it proposes is just so complicated, and would protect so few companies, that I’m not sure it would be very easy to find consensus around it in the ICANN community.
I can imagine some registries and registrars might not be too enthusiastic when they figure out that some of the proposals could add cost and friction to the sales process.
Some IP owners might also sniff at the some of the ideas, just as soon as they realize their own trademarks wouldn’t meet the high criteria for inclusion on the HARM list.
Is Melbourne IT’s proposal just too damn sensible to pass through ICANN? Or is it riddled with obvious holes that I’ve somehow manged to miss?
Discuss.

Court rules YouPorn can sue ICANN for alleged .xxx antitrust violations

A California court today ruled that ICANN is subject to US antitrust laws and therefore the lawsuit filed by YouPorn.com owner Manwin Licensing over the .xxx gTLD can proceed.
In a mixed ruling, the Central District of California District Court granted some parts of ICM Registry and ICANN’s motions to dismiss the case and rejected others.
Here’s what it had to say on the subject of antitrust law, which ICANN argued back in January did not apply to it because it “does not engage in trade or commerce”:

The Court finds the transactions between ICANN and ICM described in the First Amended Complaint are commercial transactions.
ICANN established the .XXX TLD. ICANN granted ICM the sole authority to operate the .XXX TLD. In return, ICM agreed to pay ICANN money.
This is “quintessential” commercial activity and it falls within the broad scope of the Sherman Act. Even aside from collecting fees from ICM under the contract, ICANN’s activities would subject it to the antitrust laws.

That’s a pretty definitive knock-back for ICANN’s ballsy opening manoeuvre.
The court is allowing Manwin’s claims against ICANN to proceed. Manwin has until September 9 to amend and re-file its complaint.
As you may recall, Manwin sued ICANN and ICM last November, alleging that they conspired to break competition law by, among other things, forcing companies to defensively register .xxx domains.
ICM and ICANN filed separate motions to dismiss the case on seven grounds, but according to today’s ruling only two of these requests were successful.
What strikes me as particularly interesting on a first read are the definitions of the relevant domain name markets.
Under the Sherman Act, antitrust allegations have to be based on a defined “market”. Manwin’s complaint was based on the markets for “defensive registrations” and “affirmative registrations”.
The court ruled today that the company failed make the case that “affirmative registrations” is a market — because Manwin is happily running hundreds of porn sites in .com:

The Court finds Plaintiffs have failed to adequately plead the affirmative registration market. Plaintiffs have not alleged why other currently operating TLDs are not reasonable substitutes to the .XXX TLD for hosting adult entertainment websites. To the contrary, Plaintiffs allege that Manwin’s own website YouPorn.com is the most popular free adult video website on the internet.

However, the court found that “defensive registrations” is a market for the purposes of this case.
I am not a lawyer, but my sense is that this (pdf) is important stuff.
Lawyers: do feel free to chip in in the comments or via email.

Tonight a new gTLD went live

Just as people are starting to get seriously stressed about the imminent introduction of new gTLDs, a timely reminder that this is actually the third time ICANN has run a new gTLD program.
.post has just gone live.
The gTLD, which was applied for by the Universal Postal Union as part of the 2003/2004 round, has been in limbo since it was approved in December 2009, while the UPU figured out what to do with it.
It’s going to be tightly restricted to members of the international postal community, so it doesn’t carry any of the baggage of the last new gTLD launch, .xxx.
The registry has switched back-end providers since it first applied. It had planned to go with CORE, but following a competitive bidding process last year it’s moved to Afilias instead.
I’m not currently aware of any live second-level domains; tests on www.post and nic.post and a few other usual suspects are treated by my browsers as search queries.
The news of .post’s addition to the DNS root was tweeted by ICANN chief security officer Jeff Moss this evening.

ICANN director withdrew gTLD application

ICANN director Judith Vasquez applied for a new gTLD but then withdrew the bid at the last minute.
That’s among a tapestry of factoids relating to conflicts of interest to emerge from the minutes of recent meetings of ICANN’s board of directors that were published this week.
It’s also emerged that the New gTLD Program Committee — established as a subset of the board “without conflicted members” — actually now has four “directors with conflicts that have been mitigated”.
Vasquez, a businessperson heavily involved in media and telecoms in the Philippines, according to the minutes of the May 6 meeting:

disclosed that she withdrew her new gTLD application through the customer service center, though the withdrawal cannot be completed through the TAS due to the system being offline.

As you may recall, the TLD Application System (TAS) went down April 12, suggesting that Vasquez’s bid was withdrawn close to or after that date — the original deadline for filing new gTLD applications.
It’s not know what gTLD she (or a company she works for) was applying for, or why the application was withdrawn.
The potential for a conflict in her case was first noted in her published statement of interest when she joined the board in October last year.
But as I’ve noted before, Vasquez continued to vote on matters relating to the new gTLD program up until February 7.
She’s since joined the New gTLD Program Committee.
From the same May 6 minutes, it has emerged that directors Bill Graham and Kuo-Wei Wu were both probed for conflicts by a board subcommittee — set up a year ago in the wake of Peter Dengate Thrush’s move from the ICANN chair to Top Level Domain Holdings — which:

found that both of them had conflicts, but they had been already mitigated to the satisfaction of the subcommittee. And, therefore, the subcommittee determined that those two individuals, though conflicts were identified, had mitigated those conflicts with regard to the New gTLD Program.

Details of these conflicts have not been published. Both men have sat on the committee since its inception April 10.
A non-voting board liaison, Thomas Narten, was also considered conflicted but sufficiently “mitigated” to join the committee. He works as a software engineer for IBM, which has applied for a dot-brand.
Two other directors — Sebastien Bachollet and Bertrand de La Chapelle — were identified as having conflicts which they tried and apparently failed to mitigate to the satisfaction of the board.
Bachollet was unhappy with that classification, according to a statement he entered into the minutes several weeks later, which partly reads:

I still disagree with the conclusion of the Subcommittee and on the proposed mitigating measures. I will not enter into detail here, but now I have to accept this decision and I do.
I take this opportunity to underline that there is no appeal procedure in place allowing a second view on the matter.

Bachollet is a director of the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, .xxx’s nominal sponsoring organization, which is funded by ICM Registry, an applicant for three porn-related gTLDs.
The policy think-tank founded by De La Chapelle is or was funded by companies that applied for new gTLDs or offered services to applicants, according to his latest statement of interest.
The New gTLD Program Committee has 12 voting directors at present, three of which have been previously identified as conflicted but with their conflicts mitigated.
According to the May 6 minutes, ICANN’s chief lawyer John Jeffrey explained, in response to a query from de La Chapelle, why this is not a problem:

The General Counsel and Secretary explained that there are situations where a conflict may still exist, but mitigation can be completed that will remove that conflict from having an impact on the fiduciary responsibilities to ICANN or the other entity with whom the conflict may have arisen. Those directors or liaisons may then participate as if they were nonconflicted, acting without conflict in the decisions they make for the Board. He also noted that there could be situations where, upon mitigation, there may not be a conflict at all.

Best. Domain. Name. Industry. Video. Ever.

Have you ever tried to explain what you do for a living to a friend and watched as their eyelids begin to droop?
That’s a rhetorical question. We all have. Domain names are boring.
That’s why Go Daddy’s advertising is (was?) primarily based on surgically enhanced mammary glands.
My tactic is not dissimilar. I usually explain my job with various stories from the ongoing .xxx saga. People are interested in the politics of porn.
But JPRS, the .jp registry, at some point decided to fully embrace the superficially dull nature of the domain name business in its marketing, to hilarious effect.
Check out this commercial, found via Michele Neylon.

Christian group opposes .sex, .porn, .adult

Morality In Media, one of the groups that fought the approval of .xxx for years, has launched a letter-writing campaign against the proposed .sex, .porn and .adult top-level domains.
ICANN has received a couple dozen comments of objection to the three gTLDs over the last couple of days, apparently due to this call-to-arms.
Expect more. MIM was one of the main religion-based objectors to .xxx, responsible for crapflooding ICANN with thousands of comments in the years before the gTLD was approved.
Now that .xxx has turned out to be less successful than ICM Registry hoped, MIM feels its key belief on the subject — that porn gTLDs lead to more porn — has been vindicated.
MIM president Patrick Trueman wrote in one of his comments:

During the years of this fight against the .xxx domain, we said many times that the establishment of a .xxx domain would increase, not decrease the spread of pornography on the Internet, causing even more harm to children, families and communities, and make ICANN complicit in that harm.
That prediction has been fulfilled because the porn sites on the .com domain have not vacated the .com and moved to .xxx. Rather, as we have seen, the .xxx has just added thousand of additional porn sites on the Internet and .com porn sites stayed put. ICANN bears responsibility for this. The .xxx was not needed.

For some reason, the complaints are only leveled at the three ICM Registry subsidiaries that are applying for porn-themed gTLDs, and not the other .sex applicant.
Uniregistry’s application for .sexy has not been targeted.
And MIM has apparently not read the applications it is complaining about; its call to action complains about non-porn companies having to pay “protection money” to defensively register in .sex.
However, the three ICM bids explicitly contemplate an extensive grandfathering program under which all current defensive registrations in .xxx would be reserved in .sex, .porn and .adult.

YouPorn says ICANN not immune from .xxx antitrust

YouPorn owner Manwin Licensing has rejected ICANN’s claim to be immune from antitrust liability.
The company has told a California court that its lawsuit against ICANN and .xxx operator ICM Registry is little different from the landmark case Coalition For ICANN Transparency v Verisign.
Manwin sued ICANN and ICM last November, claiming the two illegally colluded to create a monopoly that, among other things, extorted defensive registration money from porn companies.
But ICANN has said in its attempts to have the case dismissed that the antitrust claims could not apply to it as, for one reason, it “does not engage in trade or commerce”.
Manwin’s oppositions to ICANN’s and ICM’s motions to dismiss rely heavily on the fact that the court allowed CFIT v Verisign, which challenged Verisign’s 2006 .com registry agreement, to go ahead.
Essentially, ICANN is trying to wriggle out of the suit on legal grounds at an early stage, but Manwin reckons there’s precedent for it to have to answer to antitrust claims.
You can read Manwin’s latest court filings here and here.
The case continues.

Neustar hires Becky Burr as privacy chief

Neustar has recruited one of the ICANN community’s best-known lawyers as its new chief privacy officer.
Becky Burr is set to join the company June 1, reporting to general counsel Scott Blake Harris, according to a Neustar press release.
Burr is well-known in the domain name industry.
While at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration during the Clinton administration, she was one of the people most heavily involved in ICANN’s creation.
In private practice as a partner at the law firm Wilmer Hale since 2000, she’s been involved in many of the industry’s most fractious legal disputes.
Over just the last couple of years she’s represented the .Jobs Charter Compliance Coalition in its fight against Employ Media, ICM Registry in its quest to get .xxx approved, and most recently Big Room in its attempts to fend off a .eco trademark infringement lawsuit.
She’s also sat on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and its country-code Names Supporting Organization.

How to make $10,000 from .xxx domains

The policy body overseeing .xxx domain names plans to dish out grants of up to $10,000 to worthy causes.
The International Foundation For Online Responsibility expects to launch a new IFFOR Grants Program on June 1, according to a March announcement I only just noticed.
According to IFFOR, the grants will be capped at $10,000 per individual or organization and will be given to those who contribute to IFFOR’s four official policy goals:

Fostering communication between the Sponsored Community and other Internet stakeholders
Protecting free expression rights as defined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
Promoting the development and adoption of responsible business practices designed to combat online child abuse images and to support user choice and parental control regarding access to online adult entertainment, and
Protecting the privacy, security, and consumer rights of consenting adult consumers of online adult entertainment goods and services

It seems like a pretty good opportunity for free speech advocacy groups to top up their funding.
ICM Registry, the .xxx manager, gives IFFOR $10 per year for every resolving .xxx domain name registered.
Its funding is therefore very likely approaching the $1.5 million mark in the hundreds of thousands of dollars right about now.