RE: [nc-udrp] Authoritative Texts of UDRP Decisions

[Ethan Katsh <katsh@legal.umass.edu>]

At 06:59 AM 2/6/02 -0600, Neuman, Jeff wrote:
>It was always my impression that the Copyright to those decisions belonged
>to ICANN (although I admit that this was never explicitly stated in
>writing).  Someone may have done this already, but has anyone called
>eresolution to see if we could get the decisions, or if the decisions can be
>hosted elsewhere, or even if they would claim infringement if we copied
>them?

         After I heard yesterday that the eResolution site was down, I 
wrote to Louis that I had a copy of the decisions and was making them 
available at http://www.disputes.org/eresolution/  I will leave them there 
until someone persuades me to remove them but John Berryhill makes a valid 
point that there should be an "authoritative" copy somewhere and I would 
agree that  ICANN or some entity authorized by ICANN would be appropriate.

Ethan




>I know we have tried to address this problem in .us in that we are requiring
>that the decisions be sent to NeuStar to keep on file in the event that this
>happens.  For .biz, we are requesting copies of the STOP proceedings as
>well.
>
>I do believe that eresolution's decisions should also be made publicly
>available.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: John Berryhill [mailto:john@johnberryhill.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 11:54 PM
>To: nc-udrp@dnso.org
>Cc: halloran@icann.org; touton@icann.org
>Subject: [nc-udrp] Authoritative Texts of UDRP Decisions
>
>
>
>
>I find the silence on the question of copyright in UDRP opinions from the
>DRP representatives to be somewhat baffling, as the question has taken on
>some urgency.  It's a simple question which merits a yes or no answer.
>
>As of today, the plug appears to have been pulled on eresolution.ca.  Hence,
>there is now no authoritative source of the text of any eResolution
>decision, and all of the links from the ICANN UDRP index to eResolution
>decisions are now broken.  This may come as some relief to certain attorneys
>in New York who were sanctioned by a federal judge this month for having
>brought the cello.com UDRP proceeding in violation of the final order in
>_Cello Holdings v. Lawrence-Dahl Companies_.
>
>I have become aware that several individuals have privately backed up copies
>of these decisions, and have offered to make them available to me on the
>condition that I not identify them, since these individuals do not want to
>be accused of copyright infringement.  This is a ridiculous way to practice
>law - citation by Napster.
>
>On the upside, though, I guess we are all free to amend the text of these
>decisions as needed to fit, since nothing cited from an eResolution decision
>can be checked against an authoritative text.
>
>The ICANN-DRP agreement, which requires DRPs to post their decisions, is
>obviously flawed in that it fails to contemplate the possibility of a DRP
>going belly-up.  While I realize that a similar vulnerability exists due to
>ICANN's failure to implement a registar data escrow system for domain
>registrations, surely it is not a great burden for the authoritative text of
>UDRP decisions to be maintained by ICANN, rather than in potentially
>unstable proprietary databases.
>
>WIPO posts an express disclaimer on the website which permits copying.  The
>NAF website has no terms of use at all.  CPR-ADR and the Asian DRP coming
>online are too insignificant to worry about.
>
>Tim?  Does the NAF claim a copyright in NAF UDRP decisions?
>
>Jim?  Does the NAF require you to sign a release when you write one?
>
>