Forbes, the publishing and media company, recently succeeded in securing the domain name forbes.ru together withan award for damages for the amount of $300 000 from the cybersquatter Landmark VIP Services. This is the largest award of damages, in Russia, for cybersquatting.
With the imminent launch of the Cyrillic extension .рф to members of the public, it is expected that the number of cybersquatting activities will increase in the Russian Federation.
Trade mark owners have until 25 March 2010 secure their Cyrillic trade marks
ICANN recently announced the successful completion of the IDN (Internationalised Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Evaluation for four IDN ccTLDS (Egypt (مصر), the Russian Federation (рф), United Arab Emirates (امارات), and Saudi Arabia(السعودية)).
The IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process was approved by the ICANN Board at its annual meeting in Seoul, South Korea on 30 October 2009. First requests were received starting 16 November 2009. The process enables countries and territories to submit requests to ICANN for IDN ccTLDs, representing their respective country or territory names in scripts other than Latin.
Estonia is a member of the European Union, which affords Community Trade Mark (CTM) owners trade mark protection in that country but what about securing the CTM trade mark as a .EE domain name?
Well, the process is more complex. Currently .EE is a restricted country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) in that only organizations registered in Estonia are eligible to register .EE domain names, while limiting them to one domain name per organization.
This is soon to change with the announcement by EENET, the Estonian Registry, that .EE will be liberalized during 2010. We are monitoring developments in Estonia and will report any progress on our blog and newsletter.
In the meantime it is recommended that CTM owners start planning a strategy to secure their trade marks as .EE domain names in case the liberalization is announced on short notice.
It is anticipated, as was the case with the TLDs .ME and .DO, .EE will become a valuable branding tool with possible registrations such as chimpanz.ee, coff.ee and teep.ee.
For comprehensive advice on securing domain names in Estonia contact domains@lexsynergy.com or visit www.lexsynergy.tel for more contact information.
CNNIC, the official registry for .CN, announced that all overseas registrars will no longer be allowed to register .CN domains from 6 January 2010.
This measure may be temporary as the reason given for this drastic action is that the Chinese registry is experiencing difficulties in handling the new paper-based domain name application verification process introduced during December 2009.
In our experience the majority of domain name disputes or phishing scams involving .cn domain names originate from within China. The main reason for this is that the squatters and scammers know it is difficult and expensive to litigate in China and are therefore relatively unrestricted in what they can do online.
The issue is not to implement a manual verification process or restricting foreign registrars from registering domain names but rather coordinating a simple, cost effective method of recovering domain names that breach Intellectual Property Laws or the CNNIC registration agreement.
ICANN recently held an urgent meeting to discuss whether Nairobi Kenya should retain the hosting rights of the annual ICANN meeting.
Forbes, the publishing and media company, recently succeeded in securing the domain name forbes.ru together withan award for damages for the amount of $300 000 from the cybersquatter Landmark VIP Services. This is the largest award of damages, in Russia, for cybersquatting.
ICANN recently announced the successful completion of the IDN (Internationalised Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Evaluation for four IDN ccTLDS (Egypt (مصر), the Russian Federation (рф), United Arab Emirates (امارات), and Saudi Arabia(السعودية)).
Estonia is a member of the European Union, which affords Community Trade Mark (CTM) owners trade mark protection in that country but what about securing the CTM trade mark as a .EE domain name?
CNNIC, the official registry for .CN, announced that all overseas registrars will no longer be allowed to register .CN domains from 6 January 2010.