Number of records in Trademark Clearinghouse doubles since the middle of July.
As of the end of August, the Trademark Clearinghouse for new top level domain names has 10,398 trademark records. That’s double the amount as of the middle of July.
Over 97% are for ASCII characters (e.g. the type of characters you’re reading on your screen right now). Only 270 records are for internationalized domain names.
The top non-ASCII script so far is Han with 162 records. Cyrillic, Katakana, Arabic, Hangul, and Hebrew are also on the list.
Records in the Trademark Clearinghouse benefit trademark holders in two ways.
First, it helps them qualify to get matching second level domain names during sunrise.
Second, during the first 90 days that a new TLD is available, it will alert registrants if they are trying to register a domain name in which someone claims trademark rights. This will not prevent someone from registering the domains, but it puts them on notice. The trademark holder will also receive an alert that the domain has been registered.
A controversial addition to the program allows trademark holders to add up to 50 additional strings to each record if the trademark has been found to have been abused in the past.
Mark says
They still don’t accept marks with dot inside of it, such as DOMAIN.COM or WILL.I.AM, correct?
J.D. Davis says
A good article that relates to this:
http://cybrands.blogspot.com/2013/08/is-icann-name-blind.html
Philip Corwin says
Once Trademark-Plus-Fifty registration opens next month, that 10,000 can balloon quickly to 500,000