Squatters Lose .eu based on technicality

The domain frankfurt.eu like many others, was assigned to Traffic Web Holding B.V. a company registered in the Netherlands. Interestingly the same company registered:

Short before the start of the sunrise period, on 30 November 2005, Traffic Web Holding B.V. filed in total 822 trademark applications with the Benelux Trademark office

So how can a private company justify that number of trademarks and domain applications?

Short answer – they can’t and the Eurid ADR proceedings have decided in favour of the city of Frankfurt, that, unsurprisingly, had also applied for the domain.

The problem, however, is that the ADR ruling while mentioning the number of trademarks seems to ignore the obvious bad faith element of the registration.
The trademark in question was “FRANKF & URT”, so they argue that the only possible domains on which a prior right could be claimed would be hyphenated versions or other replacements of the ampersand ie. that the shorter version is not acceptable.

You can read the full decision on the ADR site