3 3 March 2001

News:

The trespass dispute between auction sites E-Bay and Bidder’s Edge ended on March 1 with an out of court settlement

The battle over file swapping site Napster was drawing to a close as we went to press. Record companies were preparing lists of copyrighted music that the site must undertake to exclude from being shared in line with the injunction obtained by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on 5 March.

The much trailed Budget decision to remove betting tax from bookmakers (see Volume 3 issue 2 February 2001) in a bid to bring them back onshore and make the UK a world centre for online betting has won a warm welcome from much of the industry.

Features:

The web continues to move in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. Napster emerged out of nowhere to grab 60 million users. Peer to peer (P2P), the technology that allows files to be swapped from PC to PC and made Napster possible, is now the hottest idea in town, despite the almost certain suffocation of its most famous offspring.

The OECD Fiscal Committee recently published their views on the circumstances in which a website server in a particular tax jurisdiction could constitute a taxable presence there (see Volume 3 issue 1 January 2001). The question of how much profit can be attributed to a server for tax purposes has now been addressed by the OECD.

On 17 January 2001 the Copyright, etc. and Trade Mark (Offences and Enforcement) Bill was introduced to Parliament by sponsor Andrew Miller MP. The Bill is due for its second reading on 9 March 2001. It has been welcomed on many sides as a welcome aid if not an answer to the ongoing battle against Intellectual Property crime often referred to as counterfeiting and piracy. In this paper I will be looking at the changes the Bill intends to implement, the augmenting problem of Piracy and the likely impact and enforceability of this Bill.

Everyone seems to have a mobile phone these days and everyone seems to be “texting” one another instead of calling. It is little wonder then that this method of communication is being seized upon as a marketing tool. However there are a number of pieces of legislation which impact on whether and how businesses can send text messages for marketing purposes.

Nominet, the .uk Registry is planning to introduce a new dispute resolution procedure which will be much closer to the ICANN Dispute Resolution Policy than its current one. However, it is an entirely separate procedure put together by Nominet with its own rules and policy and will not use the ICANN administrative framework.

P2P is being wisely canvassed as the latest wonder model for the web. The Napster phenomenon has prompted numerous start ups to search for business applications. But a fundamental question remains, how far one can construct such a model and stay within the law ?

Dispute resolution on-line is in its infancy. Stakeholders agree that the establishment of common principles for online dispute resolution providers would offer beneficial guidance. What remains to be decided is what form those principles should take and who should take the lead.

In the third and final part of our series, a WIPO panelist, who has decided on more than twenty cases, examines the issue of reverse domain name hijacking and concludes with some comments on practical aspects of using the ICANN system.