Trademark Clearinghouse About to Launch

By now, you should have heard of the new generic top-level domain names (“gTLD’s”). A gTLD is the part of the domain name after the last dot, such as .com. Perhaps over 1000 new gTLD’s will launch, with some launching in the next several months and with a continuous rollout of new gTLD’s lasting a couple or several years after that.

The Trademark Clearinghouse is scheduled to open on March 26, 2013. You can learn more at www.Trademark-Clearinghouse.com.

It’s the place where one can enter registered trademarks in order to obtain certain protections when the new gTLD’s roll out. In a nutshell, the two protections you get from the Trademark Clearinghouse are: (1) notice for a limited time if someone tries to register a domain name that matches your trademark and (2) the opportunity to register the exact match of your trademark as a domain name in (probably most of) the new gTLD’s.

For example, suppose your registered mark is ACME, and suppose one of the new gTLD’s will be .app. (There probably will be over 1000 new gTLD’s.) You would be notified for a while if someone tried to register the domain name acme.app, and you might get a “sunrise” opportunity to register that domain name before the general public gets a shot a registering it.

The filing fee charged by the Trademark Clearinghouse will be $150 per trademark registration. That does not include legal fees incurred in our getting a registered mark entered in the Trademark Clearinghouse or incurred in taking any action afterward, such as seeking “sunrise” registration of a desired domain name or taking action against someone who attempts to register a problematic domain name.