As you may know Afilias has opened a shadow database of the Whois system where registrars
can add trademark information that they inadvertently left out during Sunrise. Afilias
hopes to use this to avoid challenging domain names that do have proper trademark
rights.In at least one case this possibility is being used by a person trying
to avoid challenging by Afilias by making his registrations "facially valid". He
has been able to make the following changes:
1) The original Whois shows his supposed
trademarks to be US trademarks. This has now been changed to Liechtenstein trademarks
(a tiny country that very conveniently does not have an online trademark database).
2) And the trademark date first was 1 oct 2001. This is the last possible date
for a legal Sunrise registration, but it being a Sunday it also is a clear give-away
for fraudulent registrations. In the shadow database these dates have now been set
back a few months.
Altogether this has been a very obvious attempt to cover up
fraudulent registrations to make them 'facially valid', hoping to escape Afilias'
challenging.
The case has been reported to Afilias, who says they'll have a look
at it.
Erik