by Traverse Legal, reviewed by Enrico Schaefer - August 13, 2014 - p. Trademark News
Representatives from Trademark Verification Service Provider Deloitte and Sunrise/Claims Service Provider IBM discuss the Trademark Clearinghouse.
My name is Jan Corstens and I am with Deloitte. I am overall responsible for the Trademark Clearinghouse as has been set up by ICANN. The Trademark Clearinghouse is ICANN’s cornerstone of their right protections mechanisms for the new gTLD program. It is going to be really central point where trademark owners will be able to add their protection for the new gTLDs program. What does that mean? Well, in principle it’s going to be a centralized database with validated trademarks.
Where trademark owners and potential also their agents will get two types of protection. On the one hand, they will be allowed to participate in Sunrises during any of the start-ups of the new gTLDs that are coming up, and on the other hand, they are going to get claims services during a period. We started off now in March and since March, trademark owners and their agents are able to hand in trademarks. We have just past the five thousand mark where we have over five thousand trademarks representing over eight hundred trademark owners and around one hundred thirty trademark agents. It’s not yet, let’s say, very active at this moment. I think a majority of the community is waiting until we all really know when the new gTLD program is starting. But it looks very promising because I think, at this moment, received trademarks from over sixty countries. Now the Trademark Clearinghouse is set up by two organizations, Deloitte and IBM. Deloitte taking care of the front end of the Trademark Clearinghouse with trademark agents and owners can hand in their trademarks and then you have a centralized database that is owned by ICANN but managed by IBM. And we have someone from IBM here who can give more information about that.
Thank you Jan. My name is Dirk De Bevere for IBM and I am the overall lead for IBM’s involvement in ICANN’s new gTLD program and Trademark Clearinghouse. So as explained, we have been working for quite some time now as per Deloitte’s invitation to join forces on the project. They need the database, which is owned by ICANN Data, but it’s developed and managed by ourselves. Based on the database, there are really two components that will provide the service to the registries, registrars and the entire community. Those are the Sunrise Services and Claims Services. We are in a very excited point in time right now with serious milestones coming up in the next two to three months. So as of last week, we’ve got our first destiny environment available for the various parties to collect to the environment and start doing preliminary testing. As of the end of this month, the Sunrise environment will be available and for testing, it will be in production on August 9th (2013) and then one month later on the 9th, the Claims environment will also be available into production and already available for testing two weeks earlier. So say by the end of early September, the entire environment for Sunrise and Claim Services will also be at the availability or at the disposition of registries, registrars and the community.
As a founding partner of Traverse Legal, PLC, he has more than thirty years of experience as an attorney for both established companies and emerging start-ups. His extensive experience includes navigating technology law matters and complex litigation throughout the United States.
This page has been written, edited, and reviewed by a team of legal writers following our comprehensive editorial guidelines. This page was approved by attorney Enrico Schaefer, who has more than 20 years of legal experience as a practicing Business, IP, and Technology Law litigation attorney.
