Re: Dispute resolution

[Carl Oppedahl <carl@oppedahl.com>]

At 05:26 PM 12/21/96 -0800, Thom Stark wrote:

>I've been staying out of this discussion, because I'm still researching
>the issues.  Having said that, it seems to me that, in the interests of
>both efficiency and fairness, a better solution would be to require all
>SLD registrants to agree to enter into legally-binding arbitration with
>any disputant of their right to use of the SLD, with the costs of
>arbitration being assigned by the arbitor, based on his/her judgement
>of the relative merits of the two parties' claims.
>
>This would permit the immediate use of a SLD upon registration, would
>impose no arbitrarily-chosen limit on how long a disputant would have
>to discover a possible infringement and would impose the greatest cost
>burden on the party with the weakest case.  (I'd expect that, should
>the arbitor determine that a disuptant, for instance, had a meritless
>case, he/she would assign the entire arbitration cost to that party.)
>
>It would also allow multiple simultaneous or consecutive challenges to
>an SLD-holders use without prejudging the merits of one challenge
>based on the merits of another.  And it would keep the registry out of
>the battle altogether.
>
>In essence, my proposal is:  "Agree to binding arbitration or no SLD
>will be issued."  This applies equally to challengers as well as first
>registrants.

I can't figure out how this solves the problems.  In many cases, the
challenger has no domain name whatsoever, and thus would not have agreed to
arbitration.  Thus the challenger goes to court, or (in the present flawed
NSI environment) goes to NSI.