On February 20, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry hosted a roundtable discussion, New Regulations for the Alternative Resolution of Domain Name Disputes, which focused on various aspects of resolving domain name disputes in arbitration courts. The discussion was held by the IP Club in partnership with the Alekseev Research Center of Private Law under the Russian President, with organizational support from the STATUTE School of Law.
The discussion was attended by Michael Yakushev, ICANN Vice-President for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Marina Rozhkova, an expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences and President of the IP Club, Dmitry Afanasiev, an expert at the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications and Chairman of the Coordination Center’s Legal Regulation Committee, Sergei Kopylov, Deputy Director for Legal Affairs at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/РФ, and other well-known lawyers.
The speakers noted an increase in illegal use of intellectual property on the internet, primarily, domain names. Therefore, the speakers stressed the need to show in practice how a domain name can be protected from malicious attacks and how to counter the violation of intellectual rights on the internet. They quoted examples from the experience of European and domestic legal institutions and spoke about the features of the UDPR procedure and the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center’s activity.
Kopylov talked about problems with rights protection at Russian state courts and difficulties with executing decisions on domain disputes. “In other countries, legal costs for domain disputes are quite high, so alternative resolution mechanisms are very popular there. In Russia, the expenses are relatively low, so people prefer to go to court. That’s why, to my mind, the prospects for developing alternative mechanisms to resolve domain name disputes in Russia are still unclear,” he said.
