Domains: June 2006 Archives

It seems that some of the Irish cyberquatters are now offering their purchases for sale at exorbitant prices. At least one company has been contacted with regard to the sale of a couple of .eu domains for €2500 each!

Eurid don't seem to care about cybersquatters. According to an article published by out-law.com the registry is only concerned with the holder's details making them eligible to register the domain.

EURid now says that it will confiscate domains at any time if they are found to have broken the rules. "If we find that someone has provided inaccurate or misleading information in the registration then we will take that domain off them," said EURid spokesman Patrik Linden. "We can do that at any time."

But what if a company's rights were infringed? Will they intercede or send us to ADR instead?

I finally spoke to someone with a clue (TM) today who managed to push my transfer request along (translation - restart the entire process) and I have now got emails from Eurid to confirm my actions...

Looks like the Czech court finally got round to setting up their DNS, so now Adr.eu actually resolves.... Took them long enough!

The domain frankfurt.eu like many others, was assigned to Traffic Web Holding B.V. a company registered in the Netherlands. Interestingly the same company registered:

Short before the start of the sunrise period, on 30 November 2005, Traffic Web Holding B.V. filed in total 822 trademark applications with the Benelux Trademark office

So how can a private company justify that number of trademarks and domain applications? Short answer - they can't and the Eurid ADR proceedings have decided in favour of the city of Frankfurt, that, unsurprisingly, had also applied for the domain. The problem, however, is that the ADR ruling while mentioning the number of trademarks seems to ignore the obvious bad faith element of the registration. The trademark in question was "FRANKF & URT", so they argue that the only possible domains on which a prior right could be claimed would be hyphenated versions or other replacements of the ampersand ie. that the shorter version is not acceptable. You can read the full decision on the ADR site