The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), the organization responsible for managing Canada’s dot-ca (.ca) domain names, has recently implemented significant changes to its online WHOIS directory service used by members of the public to search for information regarding registered .ca domain names. As of June 10, 2008, the WHOIS service no longer provides personal information
(i.e., registrant name, address, telephone number, fax number and email address) of .ca domain name registrants who are individuals.
This change to the WHOIS service is presumably to protect the privacy of individual registrants. The new restrictions do not apply to domain name registrants who are not individuals (e.g., corporations), for whom personal information will continue to remain publicly available.
To address the concerns of intellectual property owners and law enforcement agencies that the new restrictions will hinder efforts to stop illegal activity by individual registrants (e.g., cybersquatting, trademark infringement or identity theft through phishing websites), CIRA has provided two separate mechanisms for contacting individual registrants in certain limited circumstances.
The first mechanism is a blind message delivery system whereby any member of the public may, through the use of web-based electronic forms at the CIRA web site, submit an electronic message that will be sent to the registrant’s email address without revealing the registrant’s address to the sender. A disadvantage of this mechanism is that it cannot be known whether the message was ever received, read or acted upon.
The second mechanism involves the submission of a request to CIRA for disclosure of registrant information by a requestor who reasonably believes in good faith that the registrant’s domain name and/or its content: (a) infringes the requestor’s Canadian registered trademark, registered copyright or issued patent; (b) infringes the requestor’s Canadian registered (federal or provincial) corporate, business or trade name; or (c) is making use of the requestor’s personal information without their knowledge or consent to commit a crime (such as fraud, theft or forgery), or to procure money, credit, loans, goods or services without authorization. If CIRA considers one of these types of good-faith disputes to exist, individual registrant information will be released to the requestor. It is too early to know the standards that CIRA will apply when making this determination.
It is noteworthy that the content of a website associated with a registered .ca domain name, and not just the domain name itself, may form the basis of a good-faith request for the personal information of an individual domain name holder. Accordingly, it should be possible to obtain individual registrant information for a .ca domain name where an associated website infringes a Canadian trademark, copyright or patent.
Peter A. Elyjiw, Toronto