WIPO registers 50,000 cybersquatting cases
The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center has registered its 50,000th cybersquatting case, as the COVID-19 pandemic drives up cases.
Over the past 20 years, WIPO has administered 50,000 Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) based proceedings covering almost 91,000 domain names and involving parties from more than 180 countries.
“The UDRP is an essential tool to help protect Internet users around the world against online deception and fraud,” said WIPO director general Daren Tang. “The 50,000th case just received by WIPO shows that the UDRP system remains as relevant to global consumer protection as it was when WIPO proposed it over 20 years ago.”
Any domain name registered in the international domains, such as .com, is subject to this dispute resolution mechanism, and many operators of national domains, such as .ch and .io, have also adopted this WIPO service.
In August last year, WIPO’s Arbitration and Mediation Center became the first non-Chinese body to provide dispute resolution services for Chinese country code top-level domains.
WIPO also noted that the pandemic has fuelled cybersquatting cases filed with the Arbitration and Mediation Center, adding to the record WIPO filing seen this year.
Between January to October 2020, the WIPO Center handled 3,405 cases, an 11% increase over the same period during 2019.
Erik Wilbers, director of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, said: “With a greater number of people spending more time online during the pandemic, cybersquatters are finding an increasingly target-rich environment.
“Rights owners, meantime, are stepping up their brand enforcement on the Internet as they further shift to marketing and selling online.”
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