Weak cases leading to failed Legal Rights Objections.
With objectors losing the first 25 decided Legal Rights Objections (LRO) to new top level domains, there are murmurs about whether or not LRO is working.
The short answer: yes.
The LRO was created to assuage fears that someone would cybersquat on a top level domain. Groups like Association for National Advertisers scared their constituents into thinking someone might apply for their well known brand.
For example, despite the $185,000 application fee, somebody other than Google would apply for .google to try to take advantage of the search giant.
That didn’t happen. Yet 69 objections were filed.
A quick look at the list explains why. Objections were filed against .VIP, .mail, and .home. Now, you tell me: when you hear these terms, what brand do you think is being cybersquatted?
Many of the objections were filed by competing applicants that engaged in trademark frontrunning by obtaining dubious trademarks for the string. Others, such as the United States Postal Service’s objection to .mail, were based on stretched interpretations of a trademark (and that’s being generous).
We’ll see a lot more of this with community objections, where people claiming to represent the gold community, the ski community, and the hotels community filed objections.
You can see a full list of the 263 filed objections here.
Philip Corwin says
While agreeing that frontrunning and dubious trademark claims deserve to fail in an LRO, and noting that making the case against a generic word gTLD is particularly high since all authorities have held up to now that a top level domain cannot be a source identifier and therefore cannot be trademarked, I do think there’s one key consideration that’s not mentioned — and that is, if a company has a well recognized trademark in a generic word for specific lines of commerce the standard for prevailing articulated so far by LRO panelists is so high that the only way to assure that is not registered in the second round is to apply for it yourself, because if someone applied for it to use in a generic way unrelated to your business activities an LRO will not likely succeed.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Philip Corwin – that’s true, and probably the reason a number of brands applied for their TLD in the first round, too. It was for defensive purposes.