1) The complainant initiates the procedure by filing a complaint that addresses the following points:
a) How the complainant is/are really nice guy(s)/gal(s), who would never do anything mean, nasty, or unfair to anybody, and are in fact working on solutions to poverty, disease, and the Middle East crisis that would be hastened greatly if they won this case.
b) How the respondent is/are really evil guy(s)/gal(s), clearly having turned to the Dark Side of the Force, and are responsible for everything bad in the world; it would be a great public service to crush them like cockroaches (or eat them like cockroaches, if it's on an episode of Fear Factor). Creativity in insulting language is encouraged.
c) How the intended use for the disputed domain name, should the complainant win it, will be of enormous public service to the Internet compared to the really stupid use or nonuse that the respondent is making.
d) The complainant should provide a list of all known domain names, in addition to the one(s) under dispute, owned by the respondent, as far as the complainant is able to uncover them; this will be of use to the panelists as described later.
2) The respondent then files a response that addresses the following points:
a) How the respondent is/are really nice guy(s)/gal(s), despite all the lies the complainant has told.
b) How the complainant is/are really evil guy(s)/gal(s), who are abusing this procedure as their Death Star to crush freedom on the Internet.
c) How, in fact, the respondent's past, present, and/or future use of the disputed domain name is, too, way better than anything the complainant is likely to do with it if they succeed in their reverse hijacking.
d) The respondent should provide a list of all known domain names, in addition to the one(s) under dispute, owned by the complainant, as far as the respondent is able to uncover them; this will be of use to the panelists as described later.
3) The complaint and response are then posted on a publicly accessible Web site, and a public forum is provided where anybody in the Internet public can make comments, suggestions, personal attacks, flames, irrelevant digressions, political diatribes, meaningless one-liners, etc., just as they do on all other Internet forums. They may also suggest additions to the lists of other domain names owned by the complainant or respondent if they are able to discover others not mentioned in the documents filed so far. In addition to augmenting the Owned Domains lists, this discussion serves the two purposes of increasing the fun level of the whole process, and providing material which may prove relevant to the Charisma and Karma Scores described below.
4) After a 30 day public comment period ends, the judging begins. The complainant and respondent are each given a numerical score as described below. If a three-member panel is elected, each panelist keeps score independently and the average of their scores is used, as there are some subjective elements which may vary between judges.
a) Each party to the case starts out with 100 points, except that any party who had a lawyer prepare their complaint or response starts with only 50 points, because Shakespeare was right about lawyers.
b) Any party to the case whose legal name contains ".com" in it loses 50 points, because putting ".com" in your name is such an idiotic trendroid thing that it deserves to be penalized.
c) Any party to the case whose legal name contains any element other than ".com" that is clearly derived from something in a domain address, like ".net", ".org", ".info", ".uk", etc., loses 25 points... that's still idiotic, but hasn't been as badly overdone by the trendroids.
d) Any party to the case whose legal name contains anything else that, in the opinion of the panelist, represents silly trendroidism, including but not limited to "e-" and "i-" prefixes, loses 25 points (in addition to any points lost in other categories... thus, a complainant or respondent whose legal name is "E-Krappy.com, Inc." loses 75 points, 50 for the ".com" and 25 for the "E-"... or maybe 100 points if the panelist decides that the cutesy misspelling of "Crappy" counts as another offense).
e) The number of domain names owned by each party (other than the one(s) under dispute) is counted up, based on the submissions by both parties and the public (checked against WHOIS information in case somebody was lying). Each party loses one point for each domain they own other than the disputed name(s), on the grounds that, the more they already have, the less logical reason they have to get yet another one... they ought to learn how to use subdomains logically. If, for either party, no more than one other domain name than the one(s) under dispute is found that they own, they are given a bonus of 50 points for either being highly efficient in their domain name usage, or very clever about concealing the WHOIS data of their domains so that nobody can find any of the others they're squatting on.
f) Depending on which TLD the challenged domain is within, the parties gain and lose points in accordance with the aptness of that TLD for the type of entity they are. (If there are several domains in different TLDs being challenged in the same case, this can result in a split decision, with different scores for the parties with regard to each domain.) A party gains 50 points if the TLD is completely appropriate for them, loses 50 points if it is completely inappropriate, and does not gain or lose points if the appropriateness is partial or ambiguous. For instance, if a .com domain is under challenge, and the complainant is a nonprofit organization and the respondent is a commercial business, the complainant loses 50 points and the respondent gains 50 points; the opposite would happen if the domain under challenge is .org. If the complainant or respondent is an individual, they neither gain or lose points for a .com or .org domain as they aren't unambiguously a commercial or noncommercial entity; however, if a sufficiently convincing case is made in the complaint or response to demonstrate the definitively commercial or noncommercial use of the domain, points might be given or taken in such cases. Anybody claiming "noncommercial fair use" in their defense in a response over a .com domain will lose 50 points regardless of what type of entity they really are, because if their use really is noncommercial, why the hell did they use a TLD that indicates that they're commercial??? Similar judgments will be made about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the parties in other TLDs, old and new -- for instance, any entity that is not a museum would lose 50 points in a dispute over a .museum domain, and any entity without a presence or connection to the island of Tuvalu would lose 50 points in a dispute over a .tv domain.
g) The complaint and response are each judged for quality and creativity. Spelling and grammar count, though allowances should be made by the panelists in cases where the language of the proceedings is not the native language of the complainant and/or respondent. Each party is awarded from 0 to 100 points, as if it were a high school English essay grade. Is this a fair criterion to use in judging who deserves to get or keep a domain name? Not really, though neither are the criteria being used now with the UDRP. At least this will encourage domains to wind up in the hands of articulate writers, which will hopefully increase the average writing quality on Web sites.
h) A "Charisma Score" is assigned by the panelist to each party based on the panelist's assessment of their level of likeability. Comments each party made about themselves and their opponent can be used to help arrive at this, as well as the contents of their respective Web sites and the comments made by the public during the public comment period. A score ranging from -100 to +100 is given, where -100 is worst and +100 best. For instance, a rapacious corporation abusing its trademarks to bully people might get -100, while somebody creating really brilliant parody Web sites might get +100, or less if the parodies really aren't very funny. This score is added to the total score, increasing or decreasing it depending on whether it's positive or negative.
i) A "Karma Score" is assigned by the panelist to each party based on the amount of good or bad impact the actual or proposed use of the domain name in question by the parties would be likely to have on the Internet-using public. (This differs from the "Charisma" score in that the former is based on the public perception of the participants, while this one is based on the panelist's assessment of the true impact the parties are likely to have, even if some of it is subtle, hidden, or frequently misunderstood.) This score also goes from -100 to +100, where, for instance, warehousing the domain with no use at all is probably a zero, putting up a really great, original, useful Web site is worth a high positive number, and putting up a useless site that pops up lots of annoying ads at the user is worth a high negative number.
5) The scores are added up for each party to the case.
6) If both parties have a negative score, then the domain name(s) in question are cancelled and neither party is allowed to register them; it's time to let somebody else have a chance at them.
7) If one or more parties have a positive score, then the party with the highest score wins; if it's the respondent, he/she/they gets to keep the domain(s) in dispute, while if it's the complainant, he/she/they gets the domain(s) transferred to him/her/them (unless he/she/they was stupid enough to request cancellation rather than transfer). If the respondent has a positive score and the complainant has a negative score, then a finding of reverse domain hijacking is additionally rendered; this is not actually worth anything, but it can be waved around as a moral victory of some sort. If the complainant has a positive score and the respondent has a negative score, the respondent is probably a dirty cybersquatter, and the complainant really ought to have sued under the anti-cybersquatting law passed by the U.S. Congress, under which they could have gotten money damages in addition to the domain name.
8) If the scores are tied, then the complainant and respondent, or designated representatives of these parties, must meet at a location designated by the resolution provider for an arm-wrestling match, covered by live webcast, to decide the case.
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