[...] the case of the sleepy WIPO panelist and the legal advice of “know your [...]

“UDRP Arbitration: A Case of Laziness?” http://tinyurl.com/dacf67

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It is natural to direct our anger at the panelists but you have to remember that the real power is in the hands of the arbitration companies – they can claim to have no influence upon individual cases but they are the ones who decide which panelists to assign to which cases and they have clearly engineered a general shift in the UDRP environment, a shift that will generate immense amounts of money for them.

Of course, just as with any form of freelancing, the panelists are aware of the interests of their employer and most will do there best not to cross those interests unless it is absolutely unavoidable. Panelists who don’t understand this, or who are too ethical to allow their own interests to overrule their sense of justice, will simply be sidelined. That was always going to happen in a privatized system with no oversight and no appeal mechanism.

Good old boys like Condon, who has proved his reliability by deciding 100% of his recent cases in favor of Complainants, will always have a seat at the table.

The real fault here, the systematic abuse, is by the arbitration companies, not the panelists – the panelists are just the monkeys, not the organ grinders.

It all about protecting their gravy train of UDRP fees I believe. They care less about these decisions.

I have heard of the ICA but have not had time to find out much about them. There is nothing to stop anyone setting up a mailing address and claiming to represent an otherwise unrepresented group, whether they are actually any good at it is another matter.

What we need is a proactive organization, that contacts the domain owner in every single UDRP case as soon as it is announced, to offer set advice and to ask for copies of the Complaint, the Response and all other submissions by both sides. That would enable them to identify bad decisions as soon as they are announced and to file federal cases within the necessary ten days.

If such cases focused upon obvious misrulings, such as those based upon Design Trademarks, they would not have to be all that expensive, you would very quickly set precedents that panelists would be wary of coming up against, and the balance within decisions would be restored to the previous, less blatant levels of bias – these greasy panelists know that they are corrupt but they presume that no-one will ever notice because domain owners have not been organized enough to call them on it.