TRADEMARK CLEARINGHOUSE ICANN selected Deloitte to operate the
Clearinghouse in partnership with technology companies IBM and Chip, which will be responsible for the technical infrastructure. Jan Corstens of Deloitte in Belgium is in charge, while Vicky Folens, who worked as the project manager for various TLD projects, is also on the team. Deloitte will be acting as overall project manager for the Clearinghouse.
Form and function
“In the first instance, the Clearinghouse is a central database where all trademark holders can submit their trademarks into the database,” says Folens. “All trademarks need to be verified and all new gTLD registries will be connected to that database.”
Tose who register will “ensure they have a sunrise code so that they can apply for a domain name that corresponds to their trademark. Second, they can also opt
to be notified if a
third party wants to register a domain name that corresponds to their trademark”.
When a third party applies for a domain name identical to a trademark registered with the Clearinghouse, the potential registrant will be notified of the Clearinghouse record and, should he choose to go ahead with the registration, the relevant
rights holder with data in the
Clearinghouse will be notified. “In the end, the registry’s policy will decide what will happen, but what the Clearinghouse will definitely do is at least ensure that the parties who need to know are notified. Tey can do what they want with that information,” Corstens says.
Preparing for launch
Te Clearinghouse is not operational yet, but with an expected, revised release date of July 2013 for the first new gTLDs to go live, there is still time to thrash out the final details. Corstens is targeting the fourth quarter of the year for the Clearinghouse to be ready for submissions of trademark data. “If we’re ready in Q4 I think we will be more than on time for when everything starts,” he says. And of course, Deloitte has a real interest in making sure everything is ready as soon as possible.
Te Clearinghouse will clearly address some of the concerns that brand owners have with the new gTLDs, but it’s important to highlight what it won’t do. Te Clearinghouse will operate using a set of matching rules, but may not cover every possible variation of a trademark.
“Te exact match is defined by the matching rules, because of course some trademarks have
20 Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 1, Issue 3
special characters, such as an ampersand, and there are different ways that ICANN envisioned how the signs can be replaced or translated,” Folens explains. “For those trademarks different matching rules will apply as to what will be considered an exact match.
“But now, for example with the trademark Deloitte, if someone registered that
three ts instead of two ts, then there will most likely not be a notification sent to the Deloitte trademark holder.”
It will remain prudent for brands to keep an eye on new domain registrations, even if they have registered their trademarks with the Clearinghouse.
Money matters
Unfortunately for its users, the Clearinghouse has to pay its way, and that means there will be costs attached to registration, filing an appeal and for the registries themselves. What the costs will be is as yet unconfirmed.
“Our biggest concern is that that’s one of the most asked questions and we still can’t give a final answer because quite a number of things are still moving,” Corstens says. “Tere will definitely be a fee for the users of the trademark, and there will be a fee for the registries that need to interact. All costs are borne by parties who use the services.
“In the case of a trademark holder, it will be an annual fee, because in order for the accuracy of the data to be maintained we will have to do an annual verification. Te initial fee we set was probably going to be around $150 (£95), and other fees will be a subset of that, but we can’t be 100 percent sure what they will be.”
Tat $150 will get you a lot of support, however, including a help service in several languages for users and a recorrection procedure through which the Clearinghouse will alert applicants if there are small mistakes in their applications and allow them to amend them without further charge. Corstens estimates that this procedure could reduce error rates to less than 1 percent, following his experience with similar issues in previous sunrise periods.
“We will help applicants as much as possible and they will have one price for the protection of that specific trademark, for all sunrises and all trademark claims periods for every TLD for that year,” he says. “Quite a number of registries have approached us and asked whether they could extend the trademark claims period, or even leave it running. We are looking into that and it seems likely that it will be possible.”
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