Uniregistry working on bulk trademark blocking service
Uniregistry is planning to launch a bulk trademark block service, along the same lines as Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List.
But it’s going to be roughly 50% more expensive than DPML, on a per-TLD basis.
The company has applied to ICANN to run what it calls “Uni EP” across its whole portfolio of 26 gTLDs.
Uni EP would be “largely identical” to DPML, according to Uniregistry’s Registry Service Evaluation Requests.
This means that anyone who has their trademark registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to block the matching string in all of Uniregistry’s TLDs.
Nobody else would be able to register that mark unless they also had a TMCH-validated trademark for the same string.
The pricing would be lower than if the brand owner individually defensively registered in each of the 26 TLDs.
With Donuts, which manages a portfolio almost 10 times as large, DPML tends to be priced around the $6,000 mark retail for a five-year block. That works to about $5 per TLD per year.
Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said Uni EP could be priced as low as $200 per year. That would work out to about $7.70 per TLD.
The relatively higher pricing might make sense when you consider the larger variation in regular pricing for Uniregistry TLDs, compared to Donuts.
It has several that retail for around $100 a year, and three — .cars, .car and .auto — that sell for close to $3,000 a year.
Still, the Uni EP price is obviously going to be a lot cheaper than regular defensive registrations.
Companies that have already purchased defensively would get to add their domains to the block service after the current registration expires, the RSEP states.
Like DPML, Uni EP would also have a “Plus” version, in which confusingly similar strings in eight scripts would also be blocked.
Uniregistry says it consulted with three brand protection registrars — CSC, MarkMonitor and Safenames — about the service and that their reactions were “favorable”.
Uniregistry’s current portfolio comprises .country, .audio, .car, .blackFriday, .auto, .cars, .christmas, .click, .diet, .flowers, .game, .gift, .guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy, and .tattoo.
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