Well I wasn't aware of these issues. Thanks for sharing!
BTW does it mean that If I own abc.com and register it as my trademark, no one can buy/use abc.in or abc... with any other extension?
In past I too have done similar stuff but never got in trouble.
hello,
actually ICANN is based mainly in the US so, any company having a US Trademark can file a dispute with ICANN if somebody else(a typosquatter or domaining evil's for suppose) buys their domains which are containing the name of the US company which has a Trademark but the bad guy got the domain before the Trademark Holding company buys that domain to find that the other guy has already got its domain name registered or if the bad guy buys a name which contains a typosquatted domain name of the original company's developed website and the company has a Trademark beforehand then the owner's of the Trademark will file a lawsuit in the US court and the ICANN has to obey the court's order and transfer the typosquatted or main company's trademark-owned domain to the owners of the trademark.
many a times typosquatters and other people get away with trademarked domains but they get caught sometimes too.
here is a few examples about how to avoid trademark issues:
a>A company registered jewellery.com or flowers.com and got a US Trademark, another guy got jewellery.in, now if the owner of jewellery.com files a lawsuit against the owner of jewellery.in
they will not win because things like jewellery, flowers, food, tv, cd, movies or names of people cannot be claimed by any 1 company as many other people worldwide like in india, russia could have a jewellery or flower shop, so filing a trademark lawsuit in this case wouldnt help the owners or jewellery.com
b>Lets say mcdonalds already owns mcdonalds.com and adobe already owns adobe.com and somebody who doesnt own that company had registered mcdonalds.in, mcdonalds.cn or adobe.in, adobe.cn would surely be loosing their domain's in a LEGAL Trademark dispute because its words like mcdonalds and adobe arent used in native language of china and india as it was with flowers.in and jewellery.in and these two US companies(mcdonalds and adobe) holding the trademark are MNC's(Multinational Company's) and they will have their units/offices in India and China too, so its obvious that since one adobe and one mcdonalds exists already in the the nation's company's registrar's list of India and China so any attempt to make a second mcdonalds or adobe would be a definite attempt to mislead the consumers of the original mcdonalds and adobe in the same country
so its considered a violation of Trademark and Company name in the same country. so be careful of MNC's specially all companies who may not be an mnc also! but are holding a Trademark.
now i hope you got my point clearly.. trademark issues dont work with domains like chocolates, pencils, flowers, jewelery, abhishekjha, jeff, ceres etc but if you make a second microsoft, ibm, adobe etc with the same niche/products then you're inviting trouble my friend!
