Thread: Spicy IP's Review of INDRP cases

Spicy IP has indicated that in future posts, it will write reviews on a few past INDRP cases.

While writing about the Bloomberg.net.in INDRP case, the writer at the Spicy IP blog states that although on the face of it the Bloomberg decision seems reasonable and uncontroversial, there are other INDRP decisions that are not:

all decisions resulting from said arbitration in the past cannot be allocated to the said uncontroversial category

Now that's an understatement! I'm glad to see the Spicy IP team will be reviewing some of these obviously flawed INDRP decisions. Now I'm not talking about trademark infringement cases like youtube.in and sonyericsson.co.in. I'm talking about cases such as jobs.in, business.in, web.in, honey.in to name just a few! How the complainants won these cases is totally beyond me...

Several of them have in fact involved certain features that are fascinating to say the least and worthy of further examination. These include granting trademark rights to terms such as “hotels”, “jobs”, “mines” etc., holding that merits and scope of .IN CCTLD's INDRP (.IN Dispute Resolution Policy) differ considerably from the UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy) on which WIPO decisions are based and hence cases in relation to the former are of scant relevance while deciding a dispute pertaining to the latter (despite similarity of the disputes concerned) as well as confiscation of domain names by the registry. Such decisions will be soon highlighted in future posts by the Spicy IP team.

I'll be very interested to read these reviews by Spicy IP. Also, it remains to be seen whether the reviews will have any actual impact in helping to reverse these flawed decisions. The Spicy IP blog is one of India's leading IP blogs. I'll keep this thread updated.

Glad to see this. INDRP decision really need to be reviewed by the experts.