... it really is going to cost a LOT of money to do all that. The reason why
the Sunrise Challenge is so expensive is because it requires real people to sort
through International applications to process them (Maybe not $295 worth, but it
must be an independent body and I guess WIPO doesn't come cheap).
Imagine this:
if it costs virtually nothing to challenge, and everyone challenges say 50,000 names,
and - at a very minimum - it takes 20 minutes to process each claim, that's 694 consecute
person-power days (non-stop) to go through the documentation. Plus there's significant
time hold-ups waiting for papers to arrive. Having a challenge priced rather highly
ensures that only serious, legitimate trademark holders would bother challenging.
I agree with Afilias's comments that they should not be in the business of validating
legitimate claims. However, what I think they should have done is just prohibited
ANY common dictionary word from being registered in Sunrise. Period. If you have
a trademark that happens to be Sun, then tough luck. Get a million .biz tickets,
or eventually buy out the lucky person who manages to get that name. Overall, this
would have ensured the integrity of .info as a mainly information resource not clouded
by cybersquatters or even businesses.
Simple database validation such as date
check and a check for duplicate trademark numbers in the round-robbin process would
also have helped remove the blatantly misrepresented applications.