TLDCON 2020 sets attendance record

The 13th TLDCON international conference for ccTLD registrants and registrars of the CIS, Central and Eastern European countries has closed. This year’s conference was held exclusively online for the first time and attracted a record number of participants. Some 265 representatives of 30 countries participated in the two- day event consisting of six fascinating sessions during which 40 excellent speakers discussed the most topical issues regarding the development of the domain industry and the internet.

The final session of TLDCON 2020 focused on legal issues. Alexander Khristoforov (Gowling WLG), Roman Lukyanov (Semenov&Pevzner), Charlotte Spencer and Gonzalo Bleda (World Intellectual Property Organization), Denis Kirichenko (RU-CENTER) and Sergei Kopylov (Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ) joined a discussion on settling domain disputes and executing court rulings. Marina Rozhkova, member of the Expert Council of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy and IP CLUB President, moderated the session and invited the participants to discuss the specifics of domain disputes, and to share their experience, case studies and possible solutions.

The speakers reviewed different types of court rulings on trademark-related domain disputes and shared their past experience in dealing with court disputes on blocking websites containing pirated content. WIPO representatives spoke about the organization’s opportunities and past experience with regard to domain disputes as well as about the advantages of the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP). They focused in particular on the domain disputes in national domains as these have certain nuances and the WIPO has a special program for national registries.

“The number of cyber disputes is growing along with the number of complaints. Last year, we set a record for the number of cases heard [over 3,500],” Gonzalo Bleda noted.

Sergei Kopylov (Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ) presented the Coordination Center’s view on handing over users’ personal data for court proceedings: “The registry does not stand in the way of copyright holders and initiatives. On the contrary, we are interested in registrars being able to hand over registrants’ data for the purpose of filing domain-related complaints. We want registrars not to be involved in any court disputes. Therefore, it is necessary to work together to change the personal data legislation in order to enable data transfer to lawyers working on such court disputes.”

Sergei Kopylov also covered the most common problems registrars deal with when executing court rulings on domain disputes. Denis Kirichenko (RU-CENTER) added that the execution procedure for registrars on Runet is quite straightforward and is enforced on a regular basis.

Andrei Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, summarized the event in his closing remarks: “I am pleased to see that over these two days, we have been talking a lot about cooperation between all of the participants and have even managed to discuss the impact of political events on the domain industry. Still, plenty of innovative projects and recently developed services remain uncovered so I hope we will return to them for a proper discussion at the next conference in 2021. Thank you to all the speakers, organizers and participants. See you at the next TLDCON.”

A video clip made shortly after the end of TLDCON 2020 reviews the highlights of the conference. The video summary was uploaded on the Coordination Center’s YouTube channel.