Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Domainer loses 3.org.uk

Kevin Murphy, March 3, 2011, 17:26:54 (UTC), Domain Policy

Domain investor Scott Jones, who managed to secure the domain name 3.org.uk in Nominet’s recent short domain names sunrise period, has lost it due to a trademark claim.
Nominet said in a statement this afternoon:

The domain name 3.org.uk was registered at the end of the Registered Rights Sunrise phase. Following registration, an objection was raised concerning the IP rights provided by the applicant for that domain. This objection has been upheld by CMS, our IP validation rights agency and the domain name has now been made available for registration during the Unregistered Rights Sunrise phase.

I think it’s a safe bet that the objection was filed by 3, the stupidly named British mobile phone company, which does business at three.co.uk.
As I blogged a few weeks ago, Nominet assigned 99 one and two-character .co.uk domain names to trademark holders under the first of two sunrise allocation phases.
Because 3.co.uk was not on that list (pdf), I’m going to assume it was applied for by one than one party. Contested domains from the sunrise are due to go to auction March 15.

Tagged: , , ,

Comments (2)

  1. Samit Madan says:

    Someone has a tm on 3?
    Wow!
    And why didn’t they apply for it at sunrise?

  2. Nic says:

    I don’t know that I would agree that the 3 is “stupidly named”. I think it is an excellent brand, and their execution in terms of logo etc is excellent as well.
    That said, here is an example, of how stupid the company is:
    They let 3.co.nz expire recently:
    http://www.expireddomains.co.nz/details.php?action=history&domain_id=530652

Leave a Reply to Samit Madan