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.
Huh, I was always under the assumption that the percentage of domains bought by individual consumers is shrinking. As in, in the early days of the internet until ~2010 where commercialization was only slowly picking up (or only concentrated to a few domains), the majority of domains were personal websites and blogs.
Yes, but a segment of the domain market still buys their name domains and defends them on the Internet.
I bought my fname+lname domain a few years ago, but I'm not planning to surrender it to a random conglomerate.
> As in, in the early days of the internet until ~2010 where commercialization was only slowly picking up (or only concentrated to a few domains), the majority of domains were personal websites and blogs.
A deep part of me hopes this part of the market never dies, for the good health of the Internet's sovereignity.
I don't think this is good.
Trademarks are country-specific, not global like domains. Further, within a country trademarks are only valid within the scope of certain classes, which means:
* There will often be more than one trademark holder of even non-surname trademarks.
* You can't trademark a surname to prevent its use generally, you can only restrict its use in a narrow sphere.
I understand why domain registrars automatically overenforce their country's trademark laws (they can't deal with the legal complications that will result from them not doing so), but it's very much not good that someone like you can get to a domain for your surname first and be told you can't have it in case the trademark holder (for which class???) might want it.
Domains are also subject to local law! For ccTLDs, it's usually that of the country in question; for gTLD, to my knowledge the US has effective jurisdiction (through ICANN) over at least some of the popular gTLDs such as .com and .net.
"Local law" in this case doesn't just include actual laws on the books, but also the risk and cost of getting sued by either a trademark holder or a non-trademark-infringing domain owner.
This is exactly the type of issue that people usually don't consider when picking a TLD, vanity or otherwise.
By following the reference they provided, which is to a post by the person running itch.io stating just that.
I don't know if the linked comment is actually correct, but the link to a comment plus quoteof the relevant part seems as factual as it gets.
s/domain names are not/DNS is not/
Basically I didn’t notice the very slight indentation on my phone. Whoops.
I don’t know who sureglymop‘s registrar is. I’d encourage them to name and shame, refusing to refund is unacceptable.
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.
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).