Trademark Clearinghouse: 2,229 Marks Have Expired – Unverified Marks Increase!

We are past the first year anniversary of the first New gTLDs and already 2,229 marks have expired at the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH).

So far 35,131 marks have been submitted to the Trademark Clearinghouse as of the 17th of March 2015.

A lot of marks were submitted to the TMCH in advance of the New gTLD launches to cover the sunrise phases of the first extensions. Trademark holders had the option to choose between a 1 year trademark registration with the Trademark Clearinghouse or a multiple-year registration. About half (49,50%) of the trademark holders opted for the 1 year registration and already 2,229 or 6.3% of the marks have expired from a total of about 10,000+ marks coming up for renewal in the next few months.

DPML blocks will start expiring too leaving a lot of blocked domain names available for registration.

The number of marks was 31,866 on the 28th of July, 32,993 on the 16th of September 2014, 33,902 marks on the 18th of November 2014 and 34,400 on the 22nd of January 2015.

So while the Trademark Clearinghouse added 731 trademarks in these past couple of months it lost 603 marks due to registration expiration. So the TMCH gained just 128 marks in the past couple of months and expirations are just starting.

Trademark submissions have slowed down and with the mark renewals coming up soon the total of registered marks will come down.

There have been 139,341 notifications sent out to TM holders so far. This means that 139,341 (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 139,341 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 139,341 domain registrations do not infringe on any trademark. Of course it all depends on the usage.

50,50% of the trademarks are registered for multiple years and 93.8% (was 95.1%) 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 been increasing fast in past 4 months. And if you think that 6.2% is a small number, it is not. We are talking about 2,178 unverified marks.