
I found a series of WTO Dispute Settlement Reports in the Hong Kong High Court Library today. I picked up the 2005 volumes and saw the cases that I helped settle back then. The self-contained rule-based WTO Dispute Settlement system is effective as its decisions can be enforced at the multilateral level.
When I picked a volume of Bullen and Leak's Precedents of Pleadings and read its intellectual property chapters, I came across a UK case authority of Toth v Emirates [2012] EWHC 517 (Ch), which I thought deserved careful study. A Chancery judge ruled that the UK Domain Name Registrar and dispute settlement service provider Nominet, rather the the courts, had the final say on the question of abusive registration of domain names such as ".co.uk". The Court reasoned that if a contract (between Nominet and the registrants) intended to "leave the question of abusive registration to the expert (and appeal panel)", a UK court should have no role to the dispute.
That led to my further e-research on the case of Yoyo.Email Ltd v Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc & Ors [2015] EWHC 3509 (Ch). Another Chancery judge ruled that registration of another's trade mark as a domain name constituted an act of passing off ie "no man may pass off his goods as those of another". In addition, the case followed the earlier decision of Toth v Emirates and ruled that the proper construction of the domain name dispute settlement contract did not give rise to a separate cause of action nor did it afford any jurisdiction to a UK court to act as an appeal or review body.
Both the WTO Dispute Settlement mechanism and the domain name dispute settlement mechanism seem administrative and practical by design, but the nature of the processes is quite judicious. Effective enforcement by the responsible institutions is their common hallmark. As for me, whether the chase of the law is paper or electronic information, the intellectual challenge and satisfaction are the same!