Let’s say there is a company called Acme Casino Ltd (I’ll use only example names herein). Let’s say I approach a .ie reseller and provide them with the Company number of Acme (which I can easy find from the CRO website), I can then register acmecasino.ie. I would provide all their real details but use my own email address, maybe acme@throwawaydomain.com.
Perhaps I could put some banner ads on the site, or redirect it to a competitor, but this greasy activity would be quickly seen and the company would reclaim the domain.
However… instead of using Acme’s full trademark what if I just used the generic element, and registered casino.ie, or related terms like gambling.ie, money.ie.
It would be very easy for me to simply register CRO RBNs containing those terms, but if I wished to save the multiple EUR 20’s that would cost then I could take what I will term the “acme route”.
Let’s say did wish to be above board and register RBNs, now let’s say we wanted to register casino.ie,gambling.ie, and money.ie. The obvious route would eb to register those three RBNs, but instead of paying for all three, what if I just got one RBN called “Casino Gambling Money”, indeed what if I was an absolute cheapskate and got “Casino Gambling Money Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3 insert rest of dictionary ad infinitum…” of course some restraint would be necessary as the CRO RBN aplications are rubber stamped by humans, and the right of refusal is reserved in the 1963 act.
In this article I have assumed that the RBN is solely for the purpose of satisfying the IEDR, however in reality it is also required to open a bank account for the hypothetical sole trader, and so another level of human rubber stamping is involved. Further, I cannot condone the above, I am just pointing out that while the IEDR consider themselves to be a “managed” registry, and indeed they do manage as much as is possible, but the public often consider the parties behing .ie domains to be respectable this is a non sequitur.
I suppose you could. I’m not sure if anyone has ever done it or tried to do it, but I can’t think of any immediate reason why it wouldn’t be possible to do so. However, if you were to do so you would need to be careful who you chose as your “target”. If the company whose name you abused were to find out, by, for example, trying to register the name themselves, it wouldn’t take that much to find out that it was already registered “to them”, so they could easily take control of it.