The Trademark Clearinghouse has sent over 20,000 notices to trademark holders based on domain registrations matching trademarks.
The Trademark Clearinghouse has now issued 20,076 trademark notifications based on second level registrations in new TLDs.
The notifications are sent to entities that have registered their marks with the Trademark Clearinghouse whenever someone registers an SLD that matches that mark.
There are only 27,252 marks submitted to the Clearinghouse, not including so-called “TM+50” submissions that are variants on submitted marks.
While that number may seem high, it does not necessarily correlate to attempts to cybersquat. There are many common terms in the Trademark Clearinghouse such as pizza, money and bank. These generic terms are quite popular and certainly make up a good number of these notifications. I also assume the number includes notices triggered by the brandholders themselves registering domains matching their marks.
17,570 notifications had been sent as of February 28, so it seems that notifications are currently being sent at a clip of over 200 a day. I suspect the reality is that the number spikes on days when a new TLD enters general availability.
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