One of the few things that Eurid seem to have done properly is providing a DAS server to supplement whois lookups.
While a whois query on a .eu domain will return none too verbose results the das query is simplistic:
whois -h das.eu:4343 get 1.0 mneylon
% .eu Domain Availability Server 1.0
%
% (c) 2005 (http://www.eurid.eu)
%
%% RC = 0
Domain: mneylon
Status: REGISTERED
No extra legal junk or dns etc., Simple results.
