Domain Title Insurance? There’s a (Patent) App for That.
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Application filed nearly a decade ago covers domain name title insurance.
Over the past few years, a number of domain industry experts have been calling for domain name title insurance. The basic idea is that a title search would be run on previous owners of a domain name to make sure it hasn’t been stolen, and insurance issued. A domain buyer (or financier) could use this to warrant against buying a stolen domain.
So I was surprised to see that someone thought of this a decade ago and filed a patent application on the idea.
U.S. Application Ser. No. 10/301,206 was filed November 21, 2002 for “Intellectual Property Asset Title Insurance”, based on a provisional patent application filed in 2001. (The same inventors filed a divisional patent that was published today.) It describes a method for creating title insurance for a number of intellectual property asset classes, including domain names.
I’m not sure if there’s a market for domain name title insurance yet, but it would certainly open up the finance community to lending more on domain names and give domain buyers peace of mind.
Further Reading:
- Art World Gets Title Insurance, Are Domain Names Next?
- Do we need Title Insurance for Domain Names?
- Network Solutions Adds to Domain Forwarding Patent
Tags: domain title insurance, patents
what you see here is domains becoming a recognized asset class. as the domain industry segments into users domains are an asset class to insure against clear title. the recent fiasco of ad.com clearly shows there is a financial interest to be insured against.and how closely out of market incubents observe the industry of domains…..