ICANN Announces CPR Institute as New Dispute Resolution Provider

(May 15, 2000 - Marina del Rey, California, USA) -- The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced today that the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution has been designated an approved provider under their Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) for domain name disputes. CPR will begin accepting complaints on Monday, 22 May 2000. For the first two months of operation it will commence a maximum of twenty proceedings per month.

CPR, a widely respected alliance of 500 general counsel of global corporations and partners of major law firms, is the fourth dispute resolution provider to be designated by ICANN to handle domain disputes, joining the National Arbitration Forum, the Disputes.org/eResolution Consortium, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. The members of the CPR Domain Name Disputes Panel are listed at the CPR website, see http://www.cpradr.org.

The UDRP was adopted in August 1999 and placed into effect by all competitive registrars in .com, .org and .net during December 1999 - January 2000. It establishes a streamlined, economical process administered by neutral arbitration companies to provide a quick and cheap alternative to litigation. The procedure applies to cases that meet all three of the following criteria:

• The domain name must be identical or confusingly similar to a name in which the complaining party has trademark rights (either through a registered trademark or a common-law trademark).
• The domain name holder must have no legitimate right or interest in the name.
• The domain name must have been registered and used in bad faith.

In its first few months of operation, the UDRP has proven to be a very popular means of quickly resolving trademark/domain name disputes. To date, 691 proceedings have been commenced under the policy involving 1022 domain names. Of those proceedings, 348 have already been resolved.

For additional information on UDRP, see http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp.htm.