Bad faith: suicide, stigma and tarnishing
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
WIPO panelists are asked to consider whether the content of the web sites tarnishes a trademark. There is clearly a lot of stigma around suicides. It is inevitable that some tarnishing may occur when suicide is mentioned.
Nonetheless, the panel needs to consider whether tarnishing is the lesser evil.
The factual revelations of a Debian / open source suicide cluster do run the risk of tarnishing the Debian trademark, I am not going to dispute that.
Yet the panel can not automatically conclude that tarnishing is done in bad faith. If the reason for publishing evidence related to a suicide cluster is in the interest of public health and preventing more suicides then it looks like tarnishing but it is NOT bad faith.
Given the nature of suicide, there is simply no way to publish these public health concerns without the counter-accusations of tarnishing.
In responding to the previous case of UDRP harassment by IBM Red Hat, in relation to the domain name WeMakeFedora.org, I made reference to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. The loss of a family member is one of the highest events on the scale, between 63 and 100 points. Significant attacks on the business, career or professional reputation are rated between 39 and 47. It is suggested that when these events and scores combine, for example, through bad luck or persistent harassment, overall scores over 300 are highly likely to have an impact on health. In other words, there is a higher risk of illness, accident and suicide for people subjected to stress of this level.
The complainant is clearly aware of these arguments from the prior WeMakeFedora.org case so their decision to embark upon a copy-cat case and deliberately submit documents referring to 2018, the specific time when I lost two family members, appears to be a reckless and deliberate attempt to knowingly impose more pain on my family and I. Therefore, it is clearly a violation of UDRP rule 15(e), harassment and bad faith by those who initiated the procedure. █