Author name: fairwindsp

By Steve Levy In one of the shortest UDRP cases I’ve ever seen, LivingSocial was able to reclaim the domain name officiallivingsocial.com, represented by yours truly. We submitted the complaint to the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) against a respondent named Amber Robinson. LivingSocial’s argument revolved around the fact that the domain name was being used […]

By Yvette Miller The multistakeholder community’s response to ICANN’s Novemeber 17th announcement of its Panel on the Future of Global Internet Cooperation was to create a working group, which is now gaining its footing and defining its mission and scope. This Internet Governance working group, which is comprised of multiple constituencies in the ICANN model,

Steve Levy ⬥ 8 December For UDRP Panelists, some cases are very straightforward and obvious and it takes very little time to draft a decision. However, every once in a while, along comes a case which should be very straightforward and obvious, but one of the parties just doesn’t quite see it that way. And

Steve Levy ⬥ 24 November I’ve won many UDRP cases where the disputed domain name fails to resolve to any website or other content. This is often called “passive holding” and it can give visitors who type in that domain the wrong impression that a brand owner has either gone out of business or has

Sam Foster ⬥ 20 November In the last decade, social media has become a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives, here in the U.S. and in most parts of the world. Over 2 billion people are now actively using social media each month, a staggering number given that a decade ago, social media sites like

Yvette Miller ⬥ 17 November ICANN 51 wrapped up without any concrete steps towards resolution on the release of two-character second-level domains (SLD) in new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) – for example, permutations such as <fw.FAIRWINDS>, where “fw” is the SLD and “FAIRWINDS” is the gTLD. However, last week, ICANN announced that gTLD owners will

Steve Levy ⬥  15 November When I think about receiving a UDRP complaint I recognize that there are some valiant causes to be defended and many hopeless cases to be conceded.  Confusing the two can be rather expensive for a respondent, as was the case here. The Two Sides of the UDRP Complaint The matter

Yvette Miller ⬥ 11 November One week out from ICANN’s next public meeting, which will be held in Buenos Aires, and a few more details about the New gTLD Program are taking shape. An open letter from Steven Crocker, Chair of the ICANN Board, to Heather Dryden, Chair of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), indicates

FairWinds Partners ⬥ 10 November The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 91 meeting is being held in Honolulu, Hawaii this week. The group works to create protocols that can be adopted to solve technical problems in the infrastructure of the Internet and as such, the IETF meetings focus more heavily on the technical side of

Steve Levy ⬥  30 October We write about trademark enforcement and domain disputes, but we rarely discuss how these policies – which allow for the resolution of disputes over domain names to take place outside of a court room – came to be. And it’s an important topic, since having a single, agreed-upon process for