As new technologies develop, national intellectual property regimes designed to protect rights such as copyright and trade marks may struggle to fulfi l their traditional roles. This may lead to reform of the scope of intellectual property rights, changes to the administrative processes for determining and defending such rights and, in the common law jurisdictions, new judicial interpretations of existing legislation and case law, to address usage in new environments or through new commercial practices. Sometimes, however, the challenge to the existing regime may not be capable of being satisfactorily addressed by the law, in terms of practical application in particular dispute scenarios. Undertaking legal action via national courts to defend an intellectual property right can be costly, time-consuming, and diffi cult to enforce outside the jurisdiction in which the case is heard. These issues are compounded where the effort and cost of engaging in infringement is minimal for the infringer compared to the possible gains. The question then is whether there may be means, other than recourse to the courts, to protect the legitimate interests of intellectual property rights holders, whilst also ensuring that they do not in turn abuse those rights. This work considers how this conundrum has played out in the area of domain name disputes and trade mark law, which has seen traditional forms of legal redress both augmented, and supplanted, by privately supplied administrative frameworks and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. And analyses the conflicts and the contribution of the law to resolve those conflicts.