OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
We have not even reached the first year anniversary of the first New gTLD and marks are already expiring at the TMCH.
So far 33,902 marks have been submitted to the Trademark Clearinghouse as of the 18th of November 2014.
Trademark holders had the option to choose between a 1 year trademark registration with the Trademark Clearinghouse or a multiple-year registration. About half (50,61%) of the trademark holders opted for the 1 year registration and already 1,181 marks have expired from a total of about 10,000+ marks coming up for renewal in the next few months.
The number of marks was 31,866 on the 28th of July and 32,993 on 16th of September 2014.
So while the Trademark Clearinghouse added 909 trademarks in these past couple of months it lost 1,181 marks due to registration expiration. So the TMCH lost 272 marks in the past couple of months and expirations are just starting.
Trademark submissions are not slowing down as fast as I expected but with the mark renewals coming up probably the total of registered marks will come down.
There have been 112,943 notifications sent out to TM holders so far. This means that 112,943 (the actual number is a lot less) new gTLD domain names have been registered that contain a mark that is registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse. The registered domains are probably less than 112,943 as when a domain, that consists of a trademark that is registered by multiple parties in the Trademark Clearinghouse, is registered then multiple notifications are sent to TM holders.
On itself that doesn’t mean something to me as it is getting more difficult with each passing day to find a dictionary term that is not registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse and because of availability most of the New gTLD domains that are registered consist of just 1 word. Most common terms such as “insurance” or even the letter “e” are trademarked.
I am almost certain that almost 99.9% of these 112,943 domain registrations do not infringe on any trademark. Of course it all depends on the usage.
50,61% of the trademarks are registered for multiple years and 97.5% of the marks have been verified. I am not sure what they mean by “verified” because there are a lot of questionable marks that are used to by top domain names in sunrise such this and this and of course these. And the percentage of unverified marks has once again increased. And if you think that 2.5% is a small number, it is not. We are talking for 848 unverified marks.
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@k, I thought that one of the usefulness of the TMCH is to notify individuals in the course of the domain purchasing process (especially checkout) that the domain/domains in their cart are trademarked for which they would have to acknowledge going a head with a purchase.
I personally NEVER buy domains with TM’s intentionally so I have never seen such a notice…oh wait a minute. I have seen one on some “property” domain for which I deleted from my cart. Do ™ domains somehow go through the filter process?
Look, pretty much any popular dictionary word has a trademark in some country of the world.
That should never stop you from buying it.
It is all about use. Don’t infringe on any trademarks and you are fine.
Like I said there are trademark from “e”, “i”, “my”, “you” and pretty much everything.
The notification is to inform you. Not stop you. What you do is your choice.
I get it. Just didn’t want the headaches lol
Bul if you bought something very generic, simple, and decent you would have seen this mark many times. Let’s take Uber for example you want to register Uber.Cruises you will get a mark notice. Anyone who wants uber.engineer it is yours for $120 per year, enjoy … Now that it has been mentioned by guess is it becomes a $60K renewal much like bronx.market
This doesn’t look very promising for the new gTLD markets in the main stream business markets. I would expect that lot’s of them will end up dropping the TM’s and only the strong will survive (like most things in life).
It appears to me that some trademark holders and their TM attorneys have abused the TM system by applying for (and receiving) a TM on what is obviously a generic term. In the case of a generic term that I registered on a new TLD and received the TMCH notice, the claimant has a TM for a generic term (verb describing an activity and a modifier word. The TM attorney, in the USPTO notes, stated that the TM registrant makes no claim to the modifier word when in reality, they may be gaming the TM system — and the correct verbiage should have been to make no claim to the generic term. After I get some advice from my own TM attorney, I may be able to share the results with Konstantinos on this blog.
Yes, look at the links I provided in the post.
I have more like these that I have not posted.
Maybe now is a good time but problem is no one cares.
I would love to see what you have.
Email me what ever you want published and I will see what I can do.
I agree with K, basically the whole dictionary of generic words seems to be trademarked 🙂 No one should stop from registering a generic word domain just because some one claims they own the generic word exclusively. The rest is just common sense.