BLOG@IP::JUR

Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

Disclaimer & About This Website

Visit the archives

Monday, July 10, 2006

Locking Away WHOIS Data?

Ms. Monika Ermert writing for

Intellectual Property Watch:

"[...] Should everybody who registers an Internet domain name be forced to publish his private address, email address and phone number on the Internet? A storm broke out over the question of the so-called Whois data at the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Marrakesh last week. [...]

The open Whois has caused registrars in countries with strict data protection laws, for example those in the European Union, considerable headaches in recent years. European data protection officials have warned ICANN on several occasions to stay within EU data protection laws. Peter Schaar, Germany's federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information and currently head of the Article 29 group of European data protection officials, reiterated this warning at the end of the week.

The question is anything but new to domain name registrars, but an ICANN task force of the Generic Name Supporting Organisation (GNSO) that was dedicated to the Whois question has struggled for nearly six years to reach consensus between registrars and users on the one side and trademark and intellectual property representatives on the other.

After the GNSO Council decided in a split vote earlier this year that the purpose of the Whois service was strictly technical, governments and stakeholders from ICANN's Intellectual Property Constituency and Business Constituency in ICANN joined forces in their claim that they must not be stripped of that source of information on domain name registrants. [...]"

In case of an upcoming legal dispute with a domain owner it would be very difficult for legitimate right holders to contact the domain owner if the full contact data were kept hidden behind the firewall. It might well be that requiring formalities before giving full domain contact data could effectively discourage attempts to establish informal contact with the domain owner, fostering full-blown formal judicial confrontation. And, if the owner data of domain owners are kept secret, should we not also demand a change in patent and trade mak law to the effect that access to Official patent and trade mark registers is limited in order to protect privacy at least insofar as natural persons are concerned? I fear that all such undertaking would clearly be less than optimal. Nobody is forced to acquire a domain, a patent or a trade mark. The ownership of all these entities should be open to the general public in order to avoid further calamities which might arise out of opportunities to mask ownership data.

Technorati Tags:

Domain Law

[Permalink]