Some people suggest that afilias is handling this the best way they can. I disagree.
First of all, if you can't check all trademarks befoe issuing registrations, then
you don't do a sunrise. Period. This problem should not even exist. You allow a special
wipo period where people can challenge after a landrush. Of course, they could have
set up the registrations process where the us, canadian and european community tm
databases were checked with the registration numbers at a minimum which would have
screened out many of the false applications. Then the other country applications
could have been checked later. There are not billions of countries having tms of
national effect. But this is not really relevant. If you cant do a sunrise period
where tm claims can be verified before issuing a tm registration, then don't do it
at all. And certainly don't do it if all there is to challenge it is for honest people
to outlay $300! What a recipe for scandal. At least make there be a heavy fine for
submitting a fake application.
Or, you require the submission of the trademark
certificate which must be validated before registration. Some say that this would
actually cost a little money or would be timeconsuming and arduous or even impossible.
Well, the bare minimum of querying the major databases was possible yet not even
this simple step was taken. In any case, impossible or simple, if you cant
do it, then you dont have a sunrise.
Why was it done? Some say just sheer stupidity.
The stupidity in not realizing that when you hurt so many people by nulling
their landrush applications you develop an image problem. That simply stating, well,
you knew it wasn't guaranteed so don't complain, was gonna make it go away. Yes,
we knew it was not guaranteed, but to lose it because of a process which encouraged
fraud by the registry itself in spite of them being warned and in spite of this potential
problem being seen a mile away by anybody is a little different than Icann offing
the extension or an earthquake. This was wholly preventable. Also, it is easy to
see that afilias makes tons of money this way, and this alone will cause people to
scrutinize the whole process further and now you have sites documenting unprecedented
fraud. Some by registrars employees themselves! It was sheer stupidity to think that
this process wouldnt end in scandal.
Others feel that it was part stupidity and
part greed. There is a lot of money to be made by taking advantage of greedy fraudsters
and by the honest public to make the challenges.
The big problem here may
not be the many registrants who registered so many fradulent tm names. The problem
here is the amount of registrar and registrar employee fraud. This is very serious
and I have a feeling that when the news media really starts to investigate this aspect
of the fraud, we all might be interested in seeing where it leads.