On April 23, the Standing Committee of Nation People’s Congress in China issued the new amendments of Chinese Trademark Law which will take effect on November 1, 2019. Six articles of the current Trademark Law are amended to further curb trademark squatters and trademark infringement. We provide a brief summary as below to show what…
The European Union for Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) released its report on the state of intellectual property infringement: “2019 Status report on IPR infringement. Why IPR are important, IPR infringement and the fight against counterfeiting and piracy (euipo.europa.eu). This report presents the results of the research constantly carried out by the European Observatory on IPR infringements…
By IP TWINS Expired domain names: there are more risks than appears .com is the main beneficiary of errors on website addresses ICANN Approves the CIIDRC as a UDRP Institution USTR Releases 2018 Report on IP Protection and Review of Notorious Markets Thesun.com: “the sun shines for everyone” A natural person receives $100,000 fine as…
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) now provides domain name dispute resolution services with the extension .UA (ccTLD, Ukraine). This procedure allows the owner of a trademark to retrieve a corresponding domain name which has been improperly registered by another person or used in bad faith. The procedure is done online, administratively. The conditions…
UNIFAB (Union des Fabricants) is a French non-profit association whose purpose is the defense and promotion of intellectual property rights. It brings together many companies and associations from all other the world, representing in kind of industries. The experience, the expertise and the network of Unifab make it a major player in the combat against counterfeiting…
Allowing domains to lapse is ordinary: a one-time marketing operation, an amended project or simply a portfolio optimization usually justify lapsing a domain. While it is natural for companies to maintain a reasonably sized domain name portfolio, allowing a domain name to lapse can have consequences beyond what was initially imagined. Obvious: service interruption The…
In a decision dated April 23, 2019, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent administrative authority, found Mr. Brian C., as a natural person, responsible for violating Canada’s anti-spam legislation and sentenced him to a monetary penalty of 100,000 CAD (Compliance Decision and Investigations CRTC 2019-111, 23 Apr. 2019). Between September 2014 and…
A study recently published by Kyle Byers on his blog growthbadger.com compares the TLD (Top-Level-Domain) .com to a selection of 7 other TLDs (.co, .org, .us, .net, .blog, .io et .biz) on 3 main traits : Trust ratings Memorability Times used instead of actual TLD Let us recall some figures as an introduction. The .com…
Of the 348.7 million domain names registered (Verisign.com, The Domain Name Industry Brief, Vol 16, Issue 1, March 2019), many of them are dormant: either they are not activated or, if they are, they only designate a parking page. There is another way to monetize a domain name: the license agreement. Admittedly, this solution can…
By resolution of May 3, 2019, the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Domain Names (ICANN) approved the Canadian International Internet Dispute Resolution Center (CIIDRC) as a dispute resolution service provider for domain names under the Uniform Domain Name Disputes Resolution Policy (UDRP) (icann.org, 2019-03-19). CIIDRC submitted its proposal in November 2018…
Last 25 April 2019, the Office of the United States Trade Representative released its 2018 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets which underscores online and physical markets reported to facilitate piracy and counterfeiting. It identifies entities that have inadequate protection for IP rightsholders, as well as new technologies, obfuscation methods, and revenue models linked to infringement….
Can trademark owners such as “The Sun” prohibit third parties from registering domain names that are identical to those trademarks? The issue raised is that of weakly distinctive trademarks because of the genericity of the word or words of which they are composed. Owners of such trademarks are inexorably exposed to stiff competition in the…
The role of registrars Each year, the USTR collects complaints from intellectual property rights holders. For the year 2018, the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, ASOP Global, shared its experience in a letter to the USTR on October 5, 2018. In this contribution, ASOP Global intended to address the problem of illegal drugs at the…
The B2C and B2B platforms known for their difficulties or their unwillingness to fight counterfeiting appear each year in a document prepared by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (“USTR”) entitled “2018 Out- of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets” (ustr.gov). Each edition is an opportunity to recall the consequences of counterfeiting on safety and…
On IP Twins Twenty years of imprisonment incurred for a domain name Intellectual Property and Sport: Some Aspects and Tips for World Intellectual Property Day HKIRC launches its registry lock A new cityTLD is coming: .MADRID New gTLD : get prepared for the .MUSIC domain names Valeo wins historical IP case at the Supreme People’s…
The frightening epic of Mr. Adams darkens. Adams is the founder of “State Snaps”, a social network with licentious content. Since followers of this social network had adopted the slogan “Do it for state”, Adams wanted to acquire the domain name doitforstate.com, whatever the cost. But the owner of the domain name refused to sell…
The World Intellectual Property Day takes place every year on April 26th. The 2019 edition is dedicated to the sport. © WIPO – We recommend reading the excellent special issue of WIPO Magazine (wipo.int) The birth of a star. Counterfeiting and cybersquatting are measured against the popularity of athletes and brands concerned. An example perfectly…
Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Limited (HKIRC) launches a new Registry lock service for the extensions it manages: .hk, .com.hk, .公司.hk, .公司.香港 et .香港. As a reminder, the registry lock allows blocking any transfer, WHOIS contact update or authoritative nameservers modification at a registry level. Actions of locking and unlocking domains obey to a specific…
The Spanish capital has a city-TLD .MADRID. Each and every new Top-Level-Domain is a new gateway for cybersquatters to find new opportunities, whether the new Top-Level-Domains are gTLDs (examples are recurrent as the following table shows) or geoTLDs (see, among many examples, that of ritzcarlton.tokyo). Initially scheduled for April 2019, the sunrise period will run…
The wait is (almost) over! The .MUSIC new gTLD had naturally attracted many registry applicants, including Amazon, Donuts and Google. After a few Legal Rights Objections and Community objections procedures, DotMusic Limited Foundation was finally designated as the .MUSIC registry. Its program includes an advisory committee in which all the stakeholder of the music industry…
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