Privacy Friendly Remedies for Intellectual Property Rights

Abstract

The paper analysis the privacy challenges of enforcing intellectual property rights on the internet. Existing remedies are generally incompatible with user privacy, hence they place additional burden on the enforcement of rights, and unnecessary opposition between the fundamental rights of privacy and the intellectual property rights. Existing regulations and case law, emphasizing these challenges, are reviewed. The paper also investigates enforcement of trademark rights online as a successful example of aligning privacy and enforcement interests. Domain seizure and takeover through the existing UDRP system is successful and is generally a privacy friendly remedy, dealing with trademark rights infringement in domain names. The author suggests that expansion of the extra-judicial domain seizure through UDRP to broader use of intellectual property enforcement may be a useful privacy-friendly addition to the existing remedies, and would allow certain marginalization of intellectual property rights infringements online.

Keywords: Data protection, privacy, intellectual property rights, remedies, enforcement

JEL Classification: K33, K42, O34