WIPO Reveals Cyber-Squatting Activity Increased 'Significantly' In 2005

by Ulrika Lomas, for LawAndTax-News.com, Brussels

27 January 2006

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announced on Wednesday that it had seen a 20% increase in the number of cybersquatting cases filed in 2005 as compared to 2004.

The Organization revealed that in 2005, a total of 1,456 cybersquatting cases were filed with WIPO’s Arbitration and Mediation Center. This increase represents the highest number of cybersquatting cases handled by the WIPO Center since 2001.

"Notwithstanding the unique effectiveness of the UDRP as a global remedy against cybersquatting, the fact that WIPO’s caseload in 2005 was the highest in four years and that many of these cases concern recently registered domain names, underlines the need for continued vigilance by intellectual property owners," observed Francis Gurry, Deputy Director General of WIPO who oversees the work of the Center.

He further noted that, while WIPO’s experience shows that UDRP disputes are heavily concentrated in the .com domain, attention must also be paid to the establishment of robust preventive mechanisms against abusive registration in new gTLDs.

"If domain names are randomly attributed in new domains, intellectual property owners will be forced to compete with cybersquatters for their own trademarks – unless additional preventive safeguards are introduced," he added.

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