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Over half a million Trademark Claims notices served

Kevin Murphy, March 25, 2014, 11:09:09 (UTC), Domain Services

The Trademark Clearinghouse has delivered over 500,000 Trademark Claims notices and prevented over 475,000 trademarked names from being registered, according to the TMCH.
The 500,000 number announced in a press release today seems to refer to pre-registration warnings that the name about to be registered matches a trademark in the TMCH database.
Three weeks ago the TMCH said it had served 17,500 post-registration notices to trademark owners in just one month. I’m inferring that this number is now up to over 25,000.
Half a million appears to be an awfully big number, especially when compared to the number of active domain names in new gTLDs, which today stands at just over 347,000.
The TMCH said today that 95% of these notices led to the name not being registered, which it said shows the success of the Claims system.
It could also mean that it’s having the “chilling effect” predicted by opponents of the process, with legitimate registrants being scared away from non-infringing uses of registered marks.
There are plenty of dictionary words in the Clearinghouse — some that match legitimate brands, some which are simply attempts to game sunrise periods and obtain potentially valuable names.
There are currently over 28,000 marks in the TMCH database.

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Comments (7)

  1. Andrew says:

    Kevin,
    About 250k of the notices were delivered to me as I tried to figure out what was in the database since they won’t just reveal the damn thing.

  2. John Berryhill says:

    I’ll second Andrew on that. The TMCH’s claim that they “prevented” those registrations is pure hogwash. The TMCH was being data-mined, and they are too stupid to realize what was going on.

  3. Patrick says:

    This is sure to be putting off legitimate and well intended registrants. Those applying for domains containing very generic dictionary words with no intent of misuse and with no infringement. Receiving a detailed trademark claim notice will be enough to put most off. They certainly come across as “register this generic word and you will be sued” notices. TMCH may view this process as a success but this is doubtless making the whole process less accessible. IMHO.

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