Rights owners will pay no more than $150 to file their individual marks into the Trademark Clearinghouse, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) confirmed yesterday.
In a blog post, chief executive Fadi Chehadé added that ICANN has signed a contract with Deloitte, making it the first approved company to validate trademarks in the Clearinghouse.
The central repository of marks is a key trademark protection measure under the generic top-level domain (gTLD) programme.
Deloitte’s services are “non-exclusive”, he said, and it will offer discounts for “bulk and multi-year submissions”.
Chehadé said ICANN may audit Deloitte’s performance (and revenues and costs) to confirm that the costs and fees for validation services are reasonable.
He added: “ICANN may add additional validators after a threshold of minimum stability is met.”
Deloitte will work with IBM, which will operate the database of marks that all new gTLD registries will connect to. But ICANN will retain all IP rights in the database, in case it wishes to pick a different operator in the future.
In the blog post, Chehadé also confirmed that ICANN is “making continued progress on negotiations with IBM for the provision of database services”. He expects the database to be ready in January 2013, giving rights owners a few months to file their marks in the Clearinghouse, before the first new domains launch in April.
This article was first published on 14 December 2012 in World IP Review
trademark clearinghouse, icann, gtlds, deloitte, ibm
