Managing Mission - Critical Domains and DNS

The Trademark Clearing House

For a good number of new TLDs under which you won't or can't directly register your names, you can gain some defence of your marks by making use of the Trademark Clearing House.

This provides a mechanism where you register your marks, allow other parties to register labels matching those marks, provided they go through an additional step where they are made aware of the contending marks and affirm that their use of the domain does not infringe on the mark.

When registering an affected domain, you may see an additional step, as in the following screen, which occurred upon registering our planb.works domain and ran into the trademark asserted by the Plan B contraceptive (one reason why we never ended up using that ...