"Afilias announced that it
would challenge the questionable entries through an intellectual-property arbitration
forum, after allowing individuals time to mount challenges of their own. LaPlante
said he expected the company to recover most of the names that have been questioned
without a fight. Recovered names will be made available to the public around the
end of March, he said.
"Our expectation is that most if not all names challenged
will remain undefended," LaPlante said.
Some .info name holders caught in the
Afilias sweep blamed domain-name retailers for their predicament.
They asserted
that retailers submitted applications during the "sunrise" period without their consent,
exposing them to Afilias' challenge.
Other registrars encouraged customers to
file during the sunrise period whether or not they had trademarks to protect, said
Robert Connor, a University of Minnesota professor.
Connor forwarded an email
to Reuters from domain-name seller SpyProductions, which urged customers to apply
during the sunrise period because Afilias was not checking to see if trademarks were
valid.
SpyProductions president Lars Hindsley told Reuters his company submitted
all applications during the sunrise period unless customers specifically said not
to.
If customers did not supply trademark data, SpyProductions filled in the applications
with meaningless, "default" data, he said. Customers could update the forms with
legitimate trademark data if they wished to do so, Hindsley said.
"Anybody who
participated in SpyProductions' preregistration system was very well informed," he
said.
Afilias' LaPlante said the company would not intervene in disputes between
retailers and their customers."