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Trademark Clearinghouse prices revealed

Kevin Murphy, January 23, 2013, 10:39:10 (UTC), Domain Services

The cost of submitting trademarks to the forthcoming Trademark Clearinghouse will start at $150 per year, the Clearinghouse operator has revealed.
In a complex fee structure documents released this morning, the Clearinghouse outlines a range of discounting schemes that could reduce the cost to as little as $95 a year for big volume users.
But it looks like it’s going to be quite difficult to qualify for really substantial discounts.
Marks submitted to the Clearinghouse will eligible for the Trademark Claims service, which alerts the owners if someone registers a matching domain name, and may be eligible for new gTLD Sunrise periods.
The fees outlined today cover both services, though new gTLD registries will of course charge their own Sunrise fees on top of what the Clearinghouse asks.
The documents break down two types of pricing: basic credit card payments (for people with 10 trademarks or fewer) and advanced prepayment pricing, which is reserved for “agents”.
Agents will in most cases be digital brand management companies (think Melbourne IT or Markmonitor) but the Clearinghouse tells us that trademark owners can also become agents if they pre-pay.
The basic, credit-card tier costs $150 per year for a single trademark. The cost is reduced to $145 per year if the trademark owner registers the mark for three or five years.
The prepaid advanced tier is rather more complicated, based on the number of “status points” customers rack up.
A status point is earned for each trademark-year registered, with bonus points awarded for multi-year registrations and registrations made in a special “early bird” period (before the first-to-launch new gTLD’s Sunrise period begins).
Excluding these bonuses, agents would have to register over 100,000 trademark-years in order to qualify for $95-a-year pricing, which is the lowest available.
Multi-year registrations would make make the discounts kick in earlier, but only after certain milestones are passed.
The Clearinghouse document gives this example:

If you register the first 3,000 trademarks for a single year, they will be charged at 145 USD per registration. The next 22,000 will be charged at 135 USD. The next 35,000 registrations will be charged at 120 USD. For 60,000 registrations you will have paid 435,000 + 2,970,000 + 4,200,000 USD, or an average price of 126.75 USD

Smart agents will likely want to register their multi-year marks first, in order to earn bonus points and more quickly qualify for the cheaper rate on their single-year registrations.
Whether agents pass on their discounts to their customers is another matter entirely.
The Clearinghouse fees will be calculated based on the number of trademarks submitted, rather than the number of domain names matching those trademarks.
Each mark will automatically get up to 10 matching domain names entered into the database. If your trademark is “Joe’s Autos” your matching domain strings could be “joesautos”, “joes-autos” and even “joe-s-autos”.
Trademark owners will have to pay an extra dollar per year for each matching domain beyond 10.
The Clearinghouse — operated by Deloitte with a back-end provided by IBM — still plans to launch later in the first quarter this year.
You can download its pricing scheme from its web site.

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Comments (5)

  1. David Taylor says:
    January 23, 2013 at 2:35 pm

    Despite being somewhat overly complex, great that the pricing is finally public. I love your comment on what the smart agents will do. Not daft that. If we do that can we have a DomainIncite “Smart” badge Kevin? 🙂

    Reply
  2. Antony Van Couvering says:
    January 23, 2013 at 7:46 pm

    The pricing is verging on predatory. The IP people have been screaming about how much the new gTLD program will cost them, and I’ve considered their claims to be overblown. But now there is new fuel on that fire.
    The initial price is reasonable. The subsequent year pricing is not. Look at previous sunrises – a higher fee initially to handle validation, then a return to the standard price. That’s how registries have handled it. The TMCH, on the other hand, keeps prices at elevated levels throughout the life of the registration.
    As far as I know IBM hasn’t published their wholesale pricing. Hopefully when they do other providers will quickly pop Deloitte’s balloon.
    Antony

    Reply
  3. Dxdomain says:
    January 20, 2015 at 9:02 am

    This post is really useful, i am also start trademark agent service in India. The clearinghouse discounts will really helpful to big and small volume customers.
    Thanks

    Reply

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