Domain 'fire sale'--breaking rules?

Greg McLamore, who founded the dot-com incubator WebMagic, is to auction 333 domain names online over the next three months. He claims that the domains represent the largest collection of first-tier, dictionary-word domain names to become available in the history of the Internet.

But McLamore could be crossing legal boundaries by selling geographical domain names. Contained within the online catalogue are domain names such as bahamas.org, barbados.net, carribean.net and singapore.org, available for prices ranging between $19,600 and $98,000.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), which runs the arbitration process for top level domain names, is due to publish a positioning paper next week on domains that include geographical names. "One of the main things that we have been asked to address in our second Internet domain name process is geographical terms," said WIPO's assiatant director general Frances Gurry. The WIPO position is expected to reinforce a European Union draft report which seeks to regulate geographical domain names. --Wendy McAuliffe, ZDNet UK