Stocdoctor said:
Not trying to have a battle with you, but it's pretty easy to guess which "generic" names have the fake trademarks. Also, the trademark information in the whois is usually very obvious with dates in the future or numbers that don't exist in the database. It's easy to check if you "want" to. If you're buying from legitimate TM holders there's no problem, but to "assume" everything is cool, just cause, don't smell so sweet.
Most know that Afilias never challenged all the fake TMs, but at the same time promised over and over again to do so. Maybe now is the time to put the lists of them and their non-action on the net and in the blogs when they are trying to win the .net registry management.
Afilias sucks. But then again so does ICANN. Den of whores and thieves.
The fake trademarks used to register sunrise names range from "very obvious" to "next to impossible to verify". Sure, some were obviously invalid (even some legitimate trademarks were entered incorrectly), but some used valid registration numbers of trademarks owned by others, and some used foreign trademarks from countries that have no online databases to check.
To me, questioning the validity of the trademarks sidesteps the bigger issue of why trademark owners were allowed preferred access to generic names, when their trademark rights do not extend to the exclusive use of the trademarked term. Many premium generics were "stolen" from us by holders of legitimate trademarks, and I for one think that stinks. The failure of the process to limit sunrise registrations to legitimate TM holders diverted attention from that misguided policy, which I believe may have motivated some of the sunrise fraud.
Please note that I'm not defending those that chose to register sunrise names with bogus trademarks.
.INFO is an Afilias product, and Afilias wrote the rules. The rules were bad. The rules were broken. Afilias failed to enforce the rules. The policy for handling the broken rules was bad. Afilias failed to fully implement the policy for handling the broken rules. The stated time limits for implementing the policy for handling the broken rules have now past, so I've decided to move on.
As far as lost registration fees, I would think any registrar that charged a landrush registration fee for a .INFO name that was not available during the landrush phase should refund the money, since the chance of success was zero. The list of names taken during sunrise was available to them, and registrars that had a clue did not waste their landrush queue trying to register names that were already taken.
No, I don't view it as a battle. I understand there are a lot of different perspectives, and a lot of the wounds are still very sore.
