I believe I can prove the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) are unlawful frauds who act against the legal rights of individuals and businesses that are subjected to ICANN domain registration complaints which the WIPO adjudicate. I aim to show you how the World Intellectual Property Organization is not an organization which justly decides whether a domain belongs with one party or another, but a vehicle for Trademark owners to circumvent higher legal rights of the defendents; the WIPO effectively deny justice.

Jack Daniels of PT Bali Discovery Tours made a great deal of about how he won a WIPO domain dispute against me regarding balidiscovery.org which I was then using to warn people about his trying to have me murdered and also colluding with corrupt Balinese police officers to abuse my civil and human rights. What he failed to mention was that his first complaint was denied for his lying about having a Trademark in the first place and with it claim to my domain name. Yes, Jack Daniels did eventually win a WIPO complaint against me under highly irregular circumstances (after he got a Trademark and had it backdated) which gave him the domain I was using on a web site which lawfully warned people about him and his company. The fact of the matter should astound you and show that the WIPO actually work unlawfully against your and my interests and legal rights.

The WIPO amongst other things has been given the power by some domain licensing bodies such as ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which regulates domains such as .com’s, .net’s and .org’s, to adjudicate over Trademark related domain disputes. That is, if you have a Trademark for “widgets” and someone else buys the domain name widgets.com or even i-sell-widgets.com, you can file a complaint with the WIPO (basic cost US$1000) to have them order you be given that / those domains. There are rules concerning domain disputes at the WIPO to protect domain owners, but you will find out these rules do not protect domain holder’s full legal rights and the WIPO is easily abused by Trademark owners into denying the disputed domain holders their legal rights. If the WIPO decides the Trademark owner has rights to your domain, they are empowered to have it transferred to them. I am going to show you just how the WIPO not just deny you and I our legal rights, but how they bend the rules and favour the Trademark owners even when they should not. I hope to illustrate exactly to you that the WIPO is one of those “Old school tie” organizations that deny justice not practise it.

I first became aware of the WIPO’s authority over domains in December 2004 when Jack Daniels / Bali Discovery Tours filed such a domain complaint against me for owning balidiscovery.org. Jack Daniels claimed to own the Trademark “Bali Discovery Tours” in Indonesia, also his company used the domain balidiscovery.com and therefore my use of balidiscovery.org to warn people about what he and his company did to me was a breach of their Trademark rights regarding domains. Actually, legally, I have every right to use and / or name (say, write about and publish) about any Trademark holder if I have due legal cause (if I am selling their product or warning people about them). The problem with the WIPO and why I contend they act unlawfully is that they ignore or critically rather avoid my and your higher legal rights; our legal rights to Freedom of Speech take precedence over a Trademark owner’s claim to unconditional rights to their Trademarked name. But I will come to that later because Daniels lost his original domain dispute because he lied; he did not have a Trademark as he stated. Interestingly Jack Daniels also made the same claim at the same time to Balinese police (against me) and therefore is guilty not just of perjury by claiming he had a Trademark when he did not but also of trying to pervert the course of justice.

Anyway, that should have been the end of it. But around 5 months later I was amazed to receive notification of an appeal by Jack Daniels to the WIPO about this domain decision. The WIPO say that once a decision has been made only under exceptional circumstances can an appeal be made by the complainant and it is required that new significant information had come to light which had it been known at the time of the original WIPO adjudication could of or would have affected the original decision. What was this startling new information Jack Daniels presented? It was a Trademark he had just got plus a statement from the Indonesian Trademark Office that Indonesian Trademarks can be backdated 6 months! But Daniels could have just gone and paid under the counter for that of course, and how did a 6 month backdate provision under Indonesian law, even if it were true, make any difference to the original WIPO decision 5 months before? I mean, Daniels had lied about having a Trademark then and even if he did have a Trademark now I registered the domain name balidiscovery.org before that Trademark date, even allowing for this questionable 6 month backdate Indonesian rule.

I laughed, I thought it was a joke, but this time there was something else very different about Jack Daniels’ appeal, it was co-authored by a prominent person within the “digital rights” arena, a “friend” (business contact) of Daniels in Australia; Terry Laidler of Logical Ideas Pty Ltd. But Mr. Laidler, who had connections with certain members of WIPO’s panelists (domain judges) did not just help Jack Daniels with the appeal, he signed it as co-complainant. Why did Terry Laidler decide to become a co-complainant and not just help Daniels prepare the appeal? I believe the only possible reason was to influence the WIPO panelists decision; Laidler pulling favours with the WIPO. I managed to get one of the three WIPO panelists changed on this basis because I found evidence from the Internet there was a connection between that person and Terry Laidler, and submitted to the WIPO this alone should force them to deny the appeal (as evidence of previous associations existed and that they were not declared by either Laidler or the panelist). You can read more about Terry Laidler on the page I have written about him, one of his positions in life and my attempt to have him criminally investigated: Victoria Police Ethical Standards Consultative Committee. That’s right; Terry Laidler is also an important member of Australia’s law enforcement agencies and what I did not mention above is I had evidence he was committing criminal acts within his complaint with Daniels.

Anyway, from the fact I informed you the WIPO still went ahead and appointed panelists you can gather they decided there was sufficient legal cause to reconsider the original decision. I was amazed; I even accused them of acting unlawfully and as a favour to Terry Laidler who had no reason or cause to act as co-complainant other than to actually get his name onto the WIPO document, and why would he want to do that? I also pointed out the fact that even if Daniels new found / issued Trademark was legitimate and could be backdated 6 months in Indonesian jurisdictional matters there was absolutely no precedent for that to affect International law on Trademarks. Also that even if it did affect International law as well, I had purchased my domain long before the date it could be applied to. I also pointed out that Jack Daniels had declared in the original WIPO complaint that the matter was also with the Balinese police and that without any official police document now stating that matter was closed, they could not under their own regulations adjudicate while the matter was still in a “higher” legal arena. I also pointed out that Daniels had used fraud and criminal acts in the compilation of his original complaint (see: Hill Associates Bangkok) which rendered it inadmissible under both their own WIPO regulations and by law. In other words, their even agreeing to the appeal was an unlawful act by the WIPO.

Although I was aghast when the WIPO informed me they were accepting the appeal to reconsider despite this, I was not even slightly surprised at the decision when it came; I was expecting it as I was sure the WIPO had decided to award the appeal to Laidler even before they read it. Daniels and Laidler had won the appeal and I was ordered to transfer the domain balidiscovery.org to Daniels. Believing that the WIPO had acted unlawfully as a favour to Terry Laidler, I looked at what I could do to reverse their decision. Unfortunately my options were to sue the WIPO in Switzerland where they are based, or to sue ICANN and the WIPO in the USA (where ICANN are based) for fraud and acting against my constitutional right to freedom of speech; yes, even though I am not a US Citizen I am entitled to Freedom of Speech in the USA and as the domain (a .org) was controlled by ICANN in the States I could sue them and the WIPO there. However the cost of doing either was astronomical and to take on two giants like that with their combined almighty legal resources was just a nonsense.

What the WIPO do is both shameful and unlawful. Unlawful first in the way they operate, although no surprises there for an organization whose sole function is to protect Trademark rights of the mostly rich and powerful, but also unlawful in that they basically deny justice. You see, my right to name and shame Bali Discovery Tours is covered by Freedom of Speech and libel laws, which are “higher” laws dealt with “higher” courts than domain Trademark disputes. The fact that US based ICANN have given adjudication rights to the Swiss based WIPO means domains under US jurisdiction can be taken away from people when they should and would not if the matter was contended in a US courtroom. The way ICANN and the WIPO get past this denial of legal rights issue is to make it a condition that Trademark owners disputing domain ownership and the current domain owner have to declare any other legal action relevant to that domain. This is because the WIPO quite rightly can not make a judgment on a matter being decided by a law enforcement agency / real judge and court somewhere else; although they unlafully did against me!

Therein lies the fraud that is the World Intellectual Property Organization. As you can imagine the people or businesses with Trademarks who are trying to get domains owned by other people (without Trademarks) have more money and influence than the later. Yet it only costs US$1000 to file a WIPO domain dispute, while it would cost a domain holder / defendant in the region of US$100,000 to defend the action if their claim to that domain, as most are, was for Freedom of Speech or Fair Commercial Use (e.g. where you sold a Trademarked product legally) reasons, because such defense action has to occur in a real court. So the rich and influential need pay only US$1000 to bring a case, but the poor defendant has to pay 100 times that amount to defend themselves and their domain. That is a denial of justice and unlawful, but who amongst us is going to take ICANN and the WIPO to court in the USA?

At this point you should understand why I give a damn about a stupid domain name. It certainly is not about the domain name itself, because Jack Daniels has no ability through the WIPO to stop me warning people about what he gets up to as the page on my site here “Bali Discovery Tours Sanur” testifies. You see, the information and warnings about Daniels / PT Bali Discovery Tours still exist and are just as prominent on the Internet as if I had the domain bali-discovery-tours.org, but because the actual domain element is nasty-bali.org, it is none of the WIPO’s business. If Daniels has any issue with what I write here, he would have to sue me in a real court, which he won’t, because he knows I would win; I tried to get matters resolved in a US Court with him before but he avoided service and refused to attend court. The WIPO solely determine who has the right to a contended domain according solely to their interpertation of Trademark law and acting as real judges when they are not, without any reference to higher laws unless they are already being pursued by the domain owner / defendant. The fact Jack Daniels now owns my former domain balidiscovery.org does not make me a criminal and it does not make any impact on my ability to inform the world about Daniels. But it sticks in my throat that the WIPO can and do act unlawfully (let them sue me if I am wrong), plus I knew that Daniels would misuse and misreport his WIPO victory to the world and corrupt Balinese police.

That incidentally was another fact I submitted to the WIPO, that Daniels would unlawfully abuse any decision in his favour with the Balinese police, not that it made any difference once Terry Laidler became co-complainant in my honest opinion. And that was exactly what Daniels did. He misrepresented a domain decision to the world on his web site as a higher legal decision that I had acted unlawfully, and he took that decision to the Balinese police to say I should be arrested because of it. Well, the police already wanted to arrest and shoot me for “spying” so I guess sending my decaying body to jail for 2 years was of no consequence really, but what still angers me is the fact the WIPO exist and operate as they do, a further obstacle to a free and just world. Despite what Daniels says the WIPO decision does not make me a criminal; instead I say it makes him, Laidler and the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) criminals but without the rubber stamp.