zlacker

>>spiral+(OP)
A similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it.

When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also never refunded me for the money already paid to lease the domain for a year. Overall it was a bad experienced with bad communication that made me switch registrar (note: this was a different registrar than mentioned here).

I think one of the problems is that as more and more individual consumers buy domains, certain legal processes and automation are not ready for that. A good registrar should anticipate that an individual private consumer may not have the legal experience or knowledge to deal with just being hit with something they were never explicitly warned of.

>>suregl+65
Trademarks are country specific while domain names are not. Would be interesting to know what happens if they took this to trial (in which country though).

>>morale+fl
Of course domain registrations are also subject to national law. .io in particular is (currently) under UK jurisdiction.

>>lxgr+Aa1
Hmm ... you're right, I could have worded that differently to help people like you understand the point being made.

s/domain names are not/DNS is not/

>>morale+tC1
I still don't get the point (presumably due to being in the set of "people like me") – could you please elaborate?

And I don't get what DNS has to do with any of this; this is a registrar/legal dispute, not a nameserver/technical one.

>>lxgr+XL1
>not a nameserver/technical one

Of course I'm not talking about the DNS implementation!

But you're right, I could be more concise with my words, in the interest of making this a more inclusive forum.

First things first:

>I don't get what DNS has to do with any of this

DNS means Domain Name System. Domain names are resolved to IP numbers (think of that like the unique phone number of a particular computer in the internet) using DNS. Registrars manage what entries go in/out of this DNS. Registrars are a player in this whole technical/social system we agreed to follow called DNS.

With regards to intellectual property and domain names, consider all of these scenarios:

A. Someone owns trademark.com, somebody else owns "The Trademark" in the US. Is there copyright infringement?

B. Someone owns trademark.com, somebody else owns "The Trademark" in Vanuatu. Is there copyright infringement?

C. Someone owns trademark.de, somebody else owns "The Trademark" in the US. The site is overwhelmingly accessed by people who reside in the US. The site provides a service identical to the one provided by "The Trademark" in the US. Is there copyright infringement?

D. Someone owns trademark.de, somebody else owns "The Trademark" in the US. The site is overwhelmingly accessed by people who reside in Germany. The site provides a service identical to the one provided by "The Trademark" in the US. Is there copyright infringement?

E. Someone owns trademark.de, somebody else owns "The Trademark" in Germany. The site provides a service identical to the one provided by "The Trademark" in the Germany. Is there copyright infringement?

F. Someone owns trademark.de, somebody else owns "The Trademark" in Germany. The site provides a service completely different to the one provided by "The Trademark" in the Germany. Is there copyright infringement?

Can you see now, how domain names and trademarks are naturally decoupled?

Edit: Sorry! On a 2nd read I caught myself making the same mistake again. By "naturally decoupled" I mean that effects (set of rules, jurisdiction, law, etc...) that apply to the first entity (domain names) do not necessarily apply to the other one (trademarks).