ICANN says “no impact” from TMCH downtime

The 10-hour outage in the Trademark Clearinghouse’s key database had no impact on domain registrations, ICANN says.
We reported earlier this week that the TMCH’s Trademark Database had been offline for much of last Friday, for reasons unknown.
We’d heard concerns from some users that the downtime may have allowed registrants to register domain names matching trademarks without triggering Trademark Claims notices.
But that worry may have been unfounded. ICANN told DI:

The issue occurred when two nodes spontaneously restarted. The cause of this restart is still under investigation. Although both nodes came back up, several services such as the network interface, TSA Service IP and the SSH daemon did not. All TMDB Services except the CNIS service were unavailable during the outage. From a domain registration point of view there should have been no impact.

CNIS is the Claim Notice Information Service, which provides registrars with Trademark Claims notice data.

Concern over mystery TMCH outage

The Trademark Clearinghouse is investigating the causes and impact of an outage that is believed to have hit its primary database for 10 hours last Friday.
Some in the intellectual property community are concerned that the downtime may have allowed people to register domain names without receiving Trademark Claims notices.
The downtime was confirmed as unscheduled by the TMCH on a mailing list, but requests for more information sent its way today were deflected to ICANN.
An ICANN spokesperson said that the outage is being analyzed right now, which will take a couple of days.
The problem affected the IBM-administered Trademark Database, which registrars query to determine whether they need to serve up a Claims notice when a customer tries to register a domain that matches a trademark.
I gather that registries are supposed to reject registration attempts if they cannot get a definitive answer from the TMDB, but some are concerned that that may not have been the case during the downtime.
Over 145,000 Claims notices have been sent to trademark owners since the TMCH came online over a year ago.
(UPDATE: This story was edited May 21 to clarify that it is the TMCH conducting the investigation, rather than ICANN.)

First new gTLD cybersquatting case goes to IBM

IBM has won the first Uniform Rapid Suspension case to be filed against a new gTLD domain name.
National Arbitration Forum panelist Darryl Wilson handed down the perfunctory decision February 12, just seven days after IBM complained about ibm.ventures and ibm.guru.
Both domains have now been suspended, redirecting to a placeholder web site which states:

This Site is Suspended
The Domain Name you’ve entered is not available. It has been taken down as a result of dispute resolution proceedings pursuant to the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) Procedure and Rules.
For more information relating to the URS, please visit: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/urs

It was a slam dunk case, as you might imagine — the URS is designed to handle slam-dunk cases.
The registrant, who we estimate spent $2,500 on the two names, did not do himself any favors by redirecting both names to IBM’s .com site.
As we and Wilson both noted, this showed that he’d registered the names with IBM in mind.
IBM’s mark is included in the Trademark Clearinghouse, so the registrant will have been given a warning at the point of registration that he may be about to infringe someone’s IP rights.
Since the names were registered IBM, we’re told, has purchased a Domain Protected Marks List block from the registry, Donuts, which will prevent the names being re-registered when they expire.

IBM files URS complaints against guy who spent $2,500 on two domains

If you were a cybersquatter, would you spend $2,500 on just two domain names without doing even the most basic research into whether you’d get to keep the names?
One individual from New Jersey has done precisely that, apparently, and has now been hit with what may well be the first new gTLD Uniform Rapid Suspension complaint, according to Donuts.
Donuts VP Mason Cole said in a DI comment today that the company has “been notified of an additional URS action involving two IBM names.”
I believe he’s referring to ibm.guru and ibm.ventures, two new gTLD domains I highlighted earlier today as being registered under Go Daddy’s Whois privacy service.
Privacy protection has since been lifted from both domains, in accordance with Go Daddy policy, revealing the registrant (assuming it’s not a fake name) as one Denis Antipov of New Jersey.
Both domains were redirecting to ibm.com when I checked a few days ago — showing that the registrant clearly had IBM in mind when he bought the names — but now do not resolve for me.
What’s funny is that the registration date of the domains is January 31. Due to Donuts’ Early Access Program, the registrant will have paid Go Daddy a total of $2,479.98 for the pair.
Now, he stands to lose that investment in a URS case that will set IBM back about the same amount.
Donuts’ Cole said: “When infringement is alleged, we want to see the due process tools developed for new TLDs put to use. Registries are not trademark adjudicators — we implement the objective decisions of others.”
UPDATE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the price the registrant will have paid for these names.

New gTLD launches: registrar coverage at less than 40% of the market

Registrars representing less than 40% of the gTLD market are ready to offer new gTLDs during their launch phases, according to the latest stats from ICANN.
ICANN released yesterday a list (pdf) of the just 21 registrars that have signed the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement and have been certified by IBM to use the Trademark Clearinghouse database.
Signing the 2013 RAA is a requirement for registrars that want to sell new gTLDs. Almost 150 registrars are currently on the new contract.
But being certified for the TMCH is also a requirement to sell names during the first 90 days of each new gTLD’s general availability, when the Trademark Claims service is running.
Together, the 21 registrars that have done both accounted for 59 million registered gTLD domain names (using August’s official numbers), which translated to 39.5% of the gTLD market.
It’s a high percentage due to the presence of Go Daddy, with its 48.2 million gTLD names. The only other top-10 registrar on the list is 1&1.
Twelve of the 21 registrars on the list had fewer than 40,000 names under management. A couple have fewer than 100.
Only one new gTLD, dotShabaka Registry’s شبكة., is currently in its Trademark Claims period.
The second batch, comprising Donuts’ first seven launches, isn’t due to hit until January 27, giving just a few weeks for the certified list to swell.
There’ll be 33 new gTLD in Claims by the end of February.
The rate at which new registrars are being certified by IBM is not especially encouraging either. Only four have been added in the last month.
Some registrars may of course choose to work via other registrars, as a reseller, rather than getting certified and doing the TMCH integration work themselves.

Trademark+50 coming in October

The controversial “Trademark+50” anti-cybersquatting service for new gTLDs is set to go live October 11 or thereabouts, ICANN announced last night.
Trademark+50 is the name given to a function of the Trademark Clearinghouse that enables trademark owners to obtain protection for strings that they’ve previously won at UDRP proceedings.
The service will be limited to 50 strings per trademark, with the total number of strings only limited by the total number of trademarks submitted.
ICANN said:

Rights holders may submit these domain name labels for association with existing Clearinghouse records as early as 11 October 2013. Once previously-abused labels have been verified, they will be integrated into the Trademark Claims service. ICANN expects this to occur by 18 October 2013, ahead of the earliest anticipated new gTLD Claims period.

In July at ICANN’s meeting in Durban, an IBM rep said that a Trademark+50 launch would be “difficult to reach before the middle of September”, which seems to have proven correct.
Pricing for Trademark+50, which we assume will entail a great degree of manual validation, does not appear to have been published yet.
Strings added to the IBM-run TMCH database under Trademark+50 will be eligible for Trademark Claims notifications, but not Sunrise periods, when new gTLDs launch.
Critics have repeatedly raised Trademark+50 as an example of ICANN going outside of its usual community-based policy-development processes in order to push through an unpopular mechanism.
Non-commercial users have criticized the system because it assumes that all strings won at UDRP are inherently cybersquatty, whereas the UDRP itself also requires the domain to have been used in bad faith.
Trademark owners have been able to submit their marks to the TMCH for several months, but Trademark+50 was a later addition to the new gTLD program’s rights protection mechanisms.

ICANN to pay $2 million to keep Trademark Clearinghouse “free” for registrars

ICANN is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to helping new gTLDs be successful, committing $2 million to keep Trademark Clearinghouse access “free” for registrars.
While TMCH pricing for trademark owners is now well-publicized, ICANN COO Akram Attalah last night revealed some of the fees for new gTLD registries and registrars.
Registries will have to pay a one-time fee of $5,000 per TLD to access the TMCH, he said.
That was reduced from $10,000 during talks with TMCH back-end provider IBM after ICANN promised to handle billing and administration, he said.
There’s also going to be a $0.30 fee for each domain that matches a TMCH record registered during Sunrise and Trademark Claims periods, he added. The specifics on this fee were a little fuzzy.
But registrars won’t have to pay a penny, it seems. Attalah said that ICANN will pay IBM $2 million to make sure the Clearinghouse is accessible and free for registrars.
“ICANN will pay $400,000 per year for five years to keep the TMCH up and running and that provides free access to all registrars,” he said on last night’s new gTLDs update webinar.
It won’t be completely free for registrars, of course.
Registrars will have to do some implementation work to support the new Trademark Claims and Sunrise specs, but the absence of fees gives them one less excuse to avoid the two rights protection periods.

Deloitte confirmed as first Trademark Clearinghouse provider

ICANN has signed a contract with Deloitte, making the company the first official trademark validation agent for the forthcoming new gTLDs Trademark Clearinghouse.
The news emerged in a blog post from ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade today.
The TMCH is going to use the registry-registrar model, with IBM acting as the centralized, sole-source database operator, and Deloitte acting as the first “registrar”.
Marks entered into the TMCH will be eligible for Trademark Claims notifications and, in cases where proof of use has been provided, Sunrise registrations.
Chehade confirmed that Deloitte can charge a maximum of $150 per trademark per year, with discounts available for multiple marks and multiple years.
IBM’s contract and associated fees have not yet been set, due largely to the fact that the TMCH implementation model is still the subject of debate and controversy.
ICANN has confirmed, however, that it will retain “all intellectual property rights” to data stored in the Clearinghouse, meaning it may be able to migrate the database to a different provider in future.
Chehade also confirmed that ICANN has received “multiple” responses to its Request For Information for a Uniform Rapid Suspension service provider that come in under its $500-per-case price target.

ICANN trademark tech summit confirmed for Brussels in just two weeks

ICANN has confirmed that it will hold a technical summit to discuss the forthcoming Trademark Clearinghouse in Brussels less than two weeks from now.
The two-day meeting will be held at the offices of Deloitte, which along with IBM has been contracted as the TMCH provider, from August 20 to 21.
As you might expect by now from the new gTLD program, the summit’s organization wasn’t particularly timely or well-communicated, leaving parts of the community fuming.
The meeting was demanded by registries and registrars at the Prague meeting in June — they want a chance for their technical guys to get into the nitty-gritty of the TMCH implmentation.
But confirmation that it’s actually going ahead only arrived in the last couple of days, leaving companies in the US and Asia-Pacific regions facing steep last-minute air fares or the less-ideal option of remote participation at ungodly hours.
I get the impression that the TMCH providers, which have been less than communicative with the registrars and registries they will soon be servicing, might be as much to blame as ICANN this time.
The TMCH is a repository for trademark data that new gTLD registries will be obliged to use in their sunrise and immediate post-launch periods.
While the policy argument has ostensibly been settled, many technical details that still need to be ironed out could have huge implications.
For example, if the registration process flow requires live queries to the TMCH, downtime could be devastating for registries if, as is expected, several gTLDs wind up launching simultaneously.
And if the TMCH protocols prove to be too complex and costly for registrars to implement, many may not bother, potentially leading to a bunch of damp squib gTLD launches.
So it’s important stuff. DI may even be in attendance, hotel prices and/or Belgian vagrancy laws permitting.

Brand owners drop hints about .brand TLD plans

The flood of negative comments to ICANN yesterday almost obscured the fact that a few companies have hinted that they will apply for their own “.brand” top-level domains.
As Antony Van Couvering first noted on the Minds + Machines blog, IBM’s comment on version four of the Draft Applicant Guidebook makes it pretty clear the idea of a .ibm is under consideration.
IBM’s filing raises concerns about the issues of sunrise periods and vertical integration, with particular reference as to whether .brand owners would be exempt from such things.
This suggests IBM is thinking about its own .brand.
If we make the (admittedly cheeky but probably realistic) assumption that the large majority of comments filed with ICANN are self-serving, we can infer that anyone taking in an interest in the nuts and bolts of running a new TLD has probably considered applying for one.
Other than IBM, I’ve notice two others so far: Microsoft and the American Red Cross.
Microsoft, while generally opposed to a large-scale new TLD launch, is very concerned about parts of the DAG that would allow ICANN to transfer a .brand delegation to a third party if the original registry were to shut down for whatever reason.
In other words, if Microsoft one day decided that running “.windows” was a waste of time and decided to shut it down, could ICANN appoint Apple to take it over?
I suggest that this is something that you only really worry about if you’re thinking about applying for a .brand TLD.
The American Red Cross comment contains references to a hypothetical scenario where it applies for its own TLD throughout.
It’s especially concerned that its administrative overheads would increase due to the high ICANN application fees, eating into the money it can spend on worthier causes.
To date, Canon is the only company I’m aware of to publicly state it will apply for a .brand.