The court decided that, although there could be no confusion in the narrow sense of the word, the use of the meta tags caused initial interest confusion, i.e. users searching for the complainant s service were diverted to the defendant s website and, once there, although they knew it was not the claimant s service, they decided to use the defendant s service instead. This confusion enabled the defendant to benefit from the claimant s goodwill in the mark. With so many on-line threats, it is not surprising that brand owners have demanded the means to resolve disputes quickly and cheaply. The aim of the policy, which came into force on 1 December 1999, was to streamline the procedure for dealing with domain name disputes. The UDRP applies to all generic TLDs and targets domain name abusers and pirates.
Communication is by e-mail and the decision is made by an impartial provider.
The UDRP has already had fairly impressive results. 226 cases have been filed with WIPO alone. The average time for processing each case has been 35 days. The first involved the domain name telstra.org . The respondent was not actually using telstra.org and had made no offer to sell it to the complainant.