Hi folks,

On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 12:35 PM, Bret Fausett <bret@uniregistry.com> wrote:

At the same time, somewhere around 3-5% of the names registered in sunrise have been registered by companies who appear to have registered a mark solely for the purpose of gaining access to the sunrise period. These names are typically registered at registrars other than the ones used by brands. Call this Group 2.
...

(At our registry, we tried to anticipate this potential abuse by including restrictions on the subsequent sale of sunrise names. See Section III of our policy document here, http://uniregistry.link/registry-policies/?file=1449. So, yes, if you are a trademark owner with a trademark registered solely to get into the sunrise, you can use the sunrise, but the name has no resale value.)

The "gamers" (Group 2) are of course rational, so if they are aware that a registry like Uniregistry has such a restriction, they'd tend to avoid Sunrise registrations. The fact that *even* with that restriction in place, 3-5% are gamed speaks volumes. If 3-5% of domain names were generating UDRPs, there'd be an outcry that "something needs to be done".

For registries *without* such a registry restriction, one would expect the gaming to be even higher, because the behaviour would be more profitable. Maybe 10%, maybe 20%, or even higher.

As I suggested in my earlier email, let's crowdsource this and let the public submit examples, if we're not going to be given access to the raw data to do the research on our own.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269

http://www.leap.com/