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Letters up for grabs, but Nominet consults first

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

The IPKat's friend Daniel Kelleher (Legal Counsel, Nominet) writes to inform him as follows, and to ask a favour:

"I was hoping that you could help us raise awareness within the IP community about a consultation we are undertaking at Nominet.

Nominet currently prohibits the registration of one-character and two-letter domain names within the second level domains it controls, including .co.uk and .org.uk. As this restriction was due to technical reasons which no longer apply, we are planning to release approximately 2,000 domain names for registration, initially via a sunrise period for trade mark holders.

We are seeking public comments before formally announcing the release process. Full details of the consultation can be found here.

We are currently in the process of writing to trade mark holders with trade marks which are the same as to the domain names being released (i.e. "AA" to "ZZ", "0" to "9" and "A" to "Z") to encourage them to respond to the consultation. I was hoping that you could also spread the word among your readers, as we'd like to hear from them (and their clients). The consultation runs until 8 June 2010".

Says the IPKat, it's good to see these domains freed up -- and Nominet has taken the right approach in seeking consultation. He hopes that not only British interests and stake-holders will respond but also readers from any other jurisdictions which may have done the same thing, so we can learn from them. Merpel wonders whether "w" counts as one letter or two ...

Full post as published by IPKat on April 08, 2010 (boomark / email).