Hi Philip,

I fully agree it is a side issue unrelated to the question put to the council by the board, but it is one I have been curious about for a while, so thank you for indulging me.

It may be the lawyer in me, butthe first thing I look for in a policy is how can this be abused? What holes need potential plugging?

Note that the use or registration does need to be infringing on the third party trademark. By the use of the spec, you give a TLD operator applying for a qualifying string the ability to reserve and allocate an unlimited number of names, completely circumventing the Sunrise requirements, depriving Trademark Owners from their ability to have the first shot at these names.

Theorethically, say you have a Mr. Joe Apple working at [BRANDNAME] who gets an employee domain for the catchy business email address joe@apple.[BRANDNAME]. Then the registry opts for an open model, does the sunrise for whatever it did not want, with Apple, Inc having no chance to get the domain name even though they would have had that chance in a "regular" sunrise.

Excluding dotBrands from Sunrise and then also allowing them to open up and keep what they already registered looks like a perfect chance for someone to abuse the system, if they wanted.

And then of course, one might ask the question why geographic TLD operators may only allocate up to 100 domain names to the local government in a pre-sunrise reservation program. Different measures?

Volker

Am 15.04.2014 17:37, schrieb BRG:

John, Volker,

since you prompted me to contribute to this debate I shall do so in a personal capacity.

Martin is on leave this week.

(Note I do not have posting rights to Council)

I believe two issues are relevant.

Firstly, do be aware that you are discussing a separate question to the one asked by the Board NGPC.

Secondly, the debate seems to me to be somewhat rarefied and seems set in the context of traditional TLDs not .brands.What may be of interest to consider is the likelihood of this activity, not the theoretical possibility. Whereas brand.com or brand.bike may be of interest, brand1.brand2 or brand2.brand1 raise issues of user confusion and trade mark infringement. Incentives are different. Further, remedies such as UDRP or even the registry-level PDDRP will be there to tackle issues of infringement.

Philip