Evolution of euthanasia & WIPO UDRP similarities exposed by W. Scott Blackmer
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Wikipedia has a long article on Aktion T4, the Nazi-era euthanasia program. It is not necessary to read the whole thing, simply picking out a couple of lines gives us the gist of it:
From August 1939, the Interior Ministry registered children with disabilities, requiring doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities; the 'guardian' consent element soon disappeared.
...
The reports were assessed by a panel of medical experts, of whom three were required to give their approval before a child could be killed.
...
When the Second World War began in September 1939, less rigorous standards of assessment and a quicker approval process were adopted. Older children and adolescents were included and the conditions covered came to include ...
In effect, it became a slipperly slope. The euthanasia program wasn't even well intentioned to begin with but once the legal framework existed, enthusiasts were constantly looking for ways to evade checks and balances.
Now we see the same slipperly slope phenomena with the WIPO UDRP.
In the beginning, it was an attempt to prevent extreme and obvious acts of cybersquatters hijacking trademarks.
Have a look at the most recent Debian UDRP defamation:
One of the disputed domain names, <debian.video>, shows videos of the Respondent at a DEBIAN development conference in 2013, as well as audio recordings from software development conferences in 2012.
In fact, Debian funds paid for volunteers to travel to those conferences and give the presentations. There is nothing in "bad faith" about publishing the videos of those events.
Most websites at the disputed domain names display the Complainant’s trademarked “swirl” logo in the upper left corner
In fact, the Debian logo page tells us that it is an open use logo, it is an unrestricted license to use the logo. Therefore, what we see in practice is that WIPO UDRP lawyers such as W. Scott Blackmer are well and truly on the slippery slope phase. Here is the open logo license:
The Debian Open Use Logo(s) are Copyright (c) 1999 Software in the Public Interest, Inc., and are released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 or any later version, or, at your option, of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
W. Scott Blackmer was clearly informed that it was an open use logo but he simply ignored the evidence in the response.
The Aktion T4 report notes:
More pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children being sent away. Many parents suspected what was happening and refused consent, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared of their charges. The parents were warned that they could lose custody of all their children and if that did not suffice, the parents could be threatened with call-up for 'labour duty'
Clearly, the nasty accusations of "bad faith" are being used to scare other joint authors of large copyrighted works that they can't use the name of their work or they will be publicly shamed on the WIPO web site.
In some cases families could tell that the causes of death in certificates were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of appendicitis, even though his appendix had been removed some years earlier.
These comments about appendicitis sound a lot like the open use logo case. If the appendix had been removed there can not be appendicitis. If the open logo can be used under a license then there can not be bad faith.
It appears that the Nazi euthanasia doctors and some WIPO UDRP panels are simply pushing headstrong over the top of the facts and working to targets. The Nazis had targets for killing and the UDRP panels appear headstrong obsessed with censoring.
Many domain name owners are only paying a small fee of $10 to $20 per year for their domain name. The cost of paying lawyers to respond to every frivolous UDRP demand is disproportionate to the cost of the domain name. Furthermore, the cost of going to court to appeal a blatantly wrong defamation is even more astronomically out of proportion to the cost of the domain name.
Therefore, when dealing with volunteers, the WIPO UDRP lawyers seem to know they can get away with anything.
The report on child euthanasia notes that children were still being euthanised even after allied troops had taken over:
The last child to be killed under Aktion T4 was Richard Jenne on 29 May 1945, in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee state hospital in Bavaria, Germany, more than three weeks after US Army troops had occupied the town.
In other words, the medical panels and the legal panels that make these decisions seem to be operating out of habit. Even when the legal environment changed and the territory was under western law, the medical and legal processes in the clinics continued to kill out of habit alone.
When some institutions refused to co-operate, teams of T4 doctors (or Nazi medical students) visited and compiled the lists, sometimes in a haphazard and ideologically motivated way.
In the W. Scott Blackmer defamation, section 6 concludes: The Panel finds that the Complainant has established the third element of the Policy with respect to all fourteen of the disputed domain names..
In other words, W. Scott Blackmer hasn't really looked for the merits of the content on a site-by-site basis, he has decided to extinguish them all with a single brush stroke. In the following paragraph, like the Nazi doctors, he compiles a big list: "For the foregoing reasons, in accordance with paragraphs 4(i) of the Policy and 15 of the Rules, the Panel orders that the disputed domain names <debian.chat>, <debiancommunity.org>, <debian.day>, <debian.family>, <debian.finance>, <debian.giving>, <debiangnulinux.org>, <debian.guide>, <debian.news>, <debian.plus>, <debianproject.community>, <debianproject.org>, <debian.team>, and <debian.video> be transferred to the Complainant."
Ironically, one of the domains that the WIPO UDRP panel was so eager to censor was the former debian.day site with the story of the Debian Day Volunteer Suicide. This is significant because the death appears to be part of a wider suicide cluster, giving weight to the argument that discussion of the suicides is in the public interest. A single, one-off case of suicide may be a private matter but a suicide timed around the project anniversary and forming part of a cluster suggests there is good cause for public discussion. █