The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and the Online Patent developer of digital platforms managing patents and trademarks have presented a service for automated checking if a domain name has been trademarked in the .RU and .РФ domains. This service was developed for copyright owners and helps to find domains with trademarks, thus preventing any possible violations. Given the lack of simplified procedures to resolve domain disputes (such as UDRP and URS) in the national domains .RU and .РФ, the new service will become an important tool for Russian companies to prevent domain disputes and to settle them out of court. The service will help to avoid the considerable expenses related to court cases.
The service’s functions complement the service which checks the domains for registered trademarks. The access to both services is free on the Coordination Center website at https://cctld.ru/service/trademark/. The consolidated service operates using the Online Patent technology. The Coordination Center provides infrastructure support in what relates to domain names registries.
The closest and only similar program is Trademark Clearing House, which allows copyright owners to quickly find any violating domains and hold talks with the scrupulous administrators of the newly registered domain names. This approach has proven to be efficient: according to Trademark Clearing House, in 95% of the cases, if potential violations are caught early enough, settling any disputes can be tackled out of court.
According to a survey carried out by Online Patent and the Coordination Center, published in 2018, only 44% of the registered trademarks have relevant domain names. On the one hand, this should give space to domain disputes. On the other hand, their number in the Russian jurisdiction is currently not growing. Copyright owners simply do not go to court to protect their rights, because given the absence of simplified procedures the legal fees are too high. The new service created by Online Patent and the Coordination Center provides copyright owners with an efficient tool for protecting their rights and avoiding any legal expenses.
“The new service presented by Online Patent, created in cooperation with the Coordination Center, will definitely get the attention of a wide circle of copyright owners, who up until recently did not have any tools for quickly finding potential violators so that domain disputes could be settled at an early stage. Court trials in these cases usually take time and are costly. The consolidated functionality of the service allows current and future domain and trademark owners to avoid making mistakes that could violate somebody’s rights, thus saving them money and time related to court trials,” said Online Patent General Director Alina Akinshina.
“For a long time, the Coordination Center has been conducting work to create conditions and mechanisms of prevention, and if needed, urgent resolution of domain disputes between copyright owners and domain name administrators. We have developed regulations, On Procedures Used in Domain Name Disputes. We also have a relevant section on our website where our lawyers answer questions related to domain disputes. The appearance of a new instrument which will prevent any possible disputes will play a significant role in this process and will benefit both copyright owners and administrators,” said Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Director Andrey Vorobyev.
