Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Trademark Clearinghouse to open March 26

Kevin Murphy, February 25, 2013, 12:21:34 (UTC), Domain Policy

The Trademark Clearinghouse is set to open its doors for submissions March 26, ICANN will announce today.
From that date, trademark owners and their agents will be able to start uploading trademark data, enabling them to participate in one or two of the new gTLD program’s rights protection mechanisms.
Adding a mark to the TMCH qualifies it for the Trademark Claims service, which notifies both rights-holders and registrants whenever somebody tries to register a domain matching the mark.
Trademark Claims will run for at least the first 60 days after each new gTLD launches, but ICANN may extend that window depending on the outcome of its “strawman” discussions.
Many trademarks will also qualify for Sunrise periods in new gTLDs by being entered into the Clearinghouse.
Submissions start at $150 per mark per year, with discounts available when marks are registered in bulk.
DI PRO subscribers can work out how painful the TMCH will be on their wallets, and how to maximize their discounts, using our Trademark Clearinghouse Cost Calculator.
The TMCH is being managed by Deloitte, with a back-end database run by IBM.
While March 26 is just four weeks before ICANN expects to approve the first new gTLDs, I wouldn’t expect to see the first Sunrise periods for a few months after that.
The TMCH is still subject to some fierce debate, and not only because of the proposed strawman changes.
On the technical side, registries and registrars have been fuming recently about the lack of any hard technical specifications for integration, which will be needed when the new gTLDs launch.
Last night, ICANN finally posted the first spec as an IETF Internet Draft.
The format, “Mark and Signed Mark Objects Mapping” describes an Extensible Provisioning Protocol extension used by the TMCH to exchange data with registries about registered trademarks.

Tagged: , , ,

Comments (6)

  1. Dr. Tom Finson Baker says:
    February 25, 2013 at 5:02 pm

    What is the address of the TMCH database/site?
    It cant be at Trademark-clearinghouse.com. That site is an informational site.
    Would they launch the site on a hyphenated-name site? That would be ludicrous.
    They have never promoted the actual site.

    Reply
    • Rubens Kuhl says:
      February 25, 2013 at 7:06 pm

      This site seems to be CHIP’s, which was listed as a contractor to both IBM and Deloitte, but not ICANN or Deloitte itself.
      tmch.icann.org would make more sense to me.

      Reply
  2. J. says:
    February 26, 2013 at 9:16 am

    So, nothing was annonced in the end ?
    Where did you get the 26th date ?
    Thanks a lot.

    Reply
  3. Dr. Tom Finson Baker says:
    February 27, 2013 at 3:50 pm

    If the TMCH site will be “ip clearinghouse” they dont own the .com for that either. The site is listed at:
    ipclearinghouse.org
    ICANN seems to be trying to outsmart its own system and is missing the boat. The will need the .com version.
    ipclearinghouse.com is owned by another private party.

    Reply

Add Your Comment