Stocdoctor said:
All they had to do was register a trademark for those generic terms (didn't even need a product) and reg them in the sunrise. For example Money.eu was registered on 13 March 2006
It wasn't illegal, but a lot of people feel that it was underhanded. The registry didn't care as long as they were making the mulla as it were.
They explained the logic behind it:
"...EURid cannot comment on the effectiveness of the trademark laws and the work of the trademark offices in Europe, nor can we remark on the EC regulation which the member states had the opportunity to comment on.
Therefore, if someone first in line for a domain name can present sufficient documentation proving that they have a prior right for that name, for instance a trademark or a company name, the name will be granted to them.
It has been suggested that the Sunrise rules should have included a cut off date so that trademarks, for instance, needed to be registered before a certain date to be a valid prior right for a Sunrise application. During the preparatory work, extensive consultations between EURid, the validation agent for the phased registration period (PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC), and the intellectual property community took place, in which all aspects of the sunrise rules were discussed, including the implementation of a registration cut off date for accepting registered trademarks.
A large majority did not want to accept such a limitation, not only because there is no support for it in the PPR (Public Policy Rules,) but also because it would disadvantage new companies or new initiatives within existing companies. That this would allow some people to register popular or generic names was considered a minor problem since the requested domain names would still need to be protected by an intellectual property right and the main objective of the Sunrise period i.e. to protect those with a prior right, would certainly be achieved..."
http://www.eurid.eu/en/general/news/eurid-comments-on-the-issue-of-generic-domain-names
teamwork said:
There should be a cut off as it's said. Eurid gave an explanation of why they didn't do it. But anyway.
Some guys spent 1k for each TM and expecting a return of *10 or *100
We spend 20 Euros for a similar return I think in the worst case.
So you spend 1k and you wish you could have 10k or 100k potential future value.
these guys spent 100k to 1m (yes you read right) to have 10m to 100 m Euros future potential value.
I believe it's a matter of size which in our case is clearly who has the money.
kind regards
John
^This post is right on target. Very much agree with this^
