Yes, I have heard of the sunrise period. I'm not a big fan of it, but let me explain
why I'm willing to live with it.First off, according to the Afilias position,
"owners of any subsisting trademark or service mark registration having national
effect (i.e. no United States state trademark applications or foreign equivalents)
and that issued prior to October 2, 2000 will be eligible to register a domain name
that is identical to its mark, using ASCII characters only." I don't see a problem
with that, since the trademark owners will *only* be able to register a domain name
that is identical to its mark. So Cisco won't be able to snatch up routers.web, and
Microsoft won't be able to snatch up software.web.
Second, with or without a sunrise
period, trademark holders are going to dispute registrations. And they're going to
win. That's a given. We can let Apple Computer have apple.web during a sunrise period,
or we can let somebody else register it and have Apple take the name away using the
UDRP. I'm not a fan of the UDRP and many of the decisions have been dead wrong, especially
in regards to very generic words like apple.web. Nonetheless, the imperfections in
the system exist and we must come to accept them. We can either deal with them before
the official beginning of registrations, or we can deal with them after the official
beginning of registrations. Personally, I favor doing it before, using the sunrise
period. It will save us the bickering of large corporations, and will save individuals
and small business owners the trouble of having to spend time and money on the UDRP
process. It should be noted that registrations placed during the sunrise period can
be disputed, so those who do have the time, money and will to fight for a registration
will be able to do so.