CIRA softens privacy policy

Last month, I talked about the new privacy policy being adopted by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). The policy, which was to have taken effect on June 10th, would have blocked efforts by trademark holders to directly contact individual domain name registrants who were violating their trademark rights. But CIRA has backed off on this aspect of their new privacy policy. As it stands now, if you are a trademark holder and you have a legitimate dispute with a domain name holder, CIRA will release contact information of the domain name registrant to you.

Although you need to apply to CIRA to access this information, at least they are providing some mechanism for resolving disputes over trademark rights. Trademark owners should be happy at this turn of events.