Recent Posts
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
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ICANN to host first-ever high-stakes dot-brand auction
Two companies that own trademark rights to the same brand are to fight it out at an ICANN auction for the first time.
Germany-based Merck Group will fight it out for .merck with American rival Merck & Co at an auction scheduled to take place July 17.
Because it’s an ICANN “last-resort” auction, the value of the winning bid will be disclosed and all the money will flow to ICANN.
It will be the first ICANN gTLD auction for three years, when a Verisign proxy agreed to pay $135 million for .web.
The two Mercks could still avoid the ICANN auction by resolving their contention set privately.
The German Merck is a chemicals company founded in 1668 (not a typo) and the US Merck was founded as its subsidiary in the late 19th century.
That division was seized by the US government during World War I and subsequently became independent.
The German company uses merckgroup.com as its primary domain today. The US firm, which with 2018 revenue of over $42 billion is by far the larger company, uses merck.com.
Both companies applied for .merck as “community” applicants and went through the Community Priority Evaluation process.
Neither company scored enough points to avoid an auction, but the German company had the edge in terms of points scored.
Both applications then found themselves frozen while ICANN reviewed whether its CPE process was fair. That’s the same process that tied up the likes of .gay and .music for so many years.
While the July auction will be the first all-brand ICANN auction, at least one trademark owner has had to go to auction before.
Vistaprint, which owns a trademark on the term “webs” was forced to participate in the .web auction after a String Confusion Objection loss, but due to the technicalities of the process only had to pay $1 for .webs.
Wow 8 years….
http://www.circleid.com/posts/why_icann_isnt_being_very_sensible_part_i_brands/
“Who gets .merck? The U.S. drug company? Or the German drug company with the same name? This is a step backwards; in the existing hierarchical system merck.de and merck.com can equitably coexist.”
I bet the gloves will be coming off on this one…
And it is not adequate that one has the .de and one has the .com since both operate internationally, thus the .com is much, much stronger.
If anything were fair, the other could have the .brand