Understanding the debian.community WIPO UDRP verdict

The WIPO UDRP verdict is 12 pages long and surrounded by a lot of ugly noise. The Debian cabal's interpretation sounds like a pack of dogs barking at a cat who is sitting in the tree. Is there any signal in the noise?

There are two points in the verdict that are actually interesting for the community as a whole:

The Panel confirms that this finding does not imply that it has taken any view of the ownership of copyright in DEBIAN software. Indeed, it is unable to do so on the evidence before it.

Therefore, who really owns Debian? We all do. Trying to hide or obfuscate the identities of some authors is an example of cybertorture.

Nonetheless, how do we document that in legal terms to meet the legitimate interest test of future UDRP cases?

Unlike the circumstances in Religious Technology Center (Scientology) v. Freie Zone E.V, supra the Respondent in the present case is not using the disputed domain name to disseminate information about its copyright work.

This point is clearer: the panel is suggesting that if a genuine volunteer wants to register a debian.* domain, they need to use the web site to disseminate information about their contributions to Debian. This may include hosting an APT repository, publishing screenshots and videos, documentation and similar things about their packages.

If a web site follows this pattern then it may succeed with the same defence used in the Scientologie.org verdict.

A lot of Debian money is currently being wasted to try and attack the Debian trademark in Switzerland. The recent case of the chocolate bunny trademark spent close to three years in the Swiss legal system going through the various appeals all the way to the federal tribunal. Even if Software in the Public Interest spends such vast sums of money to reorganize ownership of the trademark, they will still have to start over again at square one using the UDRP to censor domains one by one.