Due to the fact that the Internet, which is widely used by almost everyone and represents a major source for information in our daily life, the importance of securing and protecting domain names has become a vital issue around the world.
When filing for trademark protection, you guarantee that you have protected your trademark and you are the only one authorized to use it, but this does not prevent someone from registering your trademark as a domain name and to use it against your services or products. So, if you file a trademark application for “Brandname” under a certain class and did not register it as a domain name, someone else can register it as “brandname.com” or “brandname.co.uk,” and use it to market his own products and services taking advantage of your own trademark.
Nowadays, the spread of the Internet enabled people to look for a certain piece of information by using the numerous search engines from home, office or similarly, logging on to their WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) enabled mobile phones while on the move. So if your IPRs are not well protected over the Internet, you will face the fact that your customers are being misled!
Therefore, many companies register their trademarks as domain names, and when we say domain names, we have to differentiate that they are divided into two types, namely; generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) and country-code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs). GTLDs are those domain names that are not restricted to a certain country but they are general such as .com, .net, and .org. ccTLDs are those domain names that belong to a specific country, such as .us (USA), .uk (UK), and .ae (UAE). So, when companies consider registering their domain names, they register them under several gTLDs and under ccTLDs in countries where they sell their products or services.
The introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) will help bridge the digital divide by transforming the Internet into a multilingual environment, but at the same time it will introduce another area where trademarks owners have to carefully look into, in order to protect their Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). As the case in trademarks, trademarks owners have to consider protecting their domain names’ translation and transliteration .
To conclude, it is worth spending a little more in order to protect your domain names under certain gTLDs and ccTLDs of importance, because once your domain names are taken from you, they are not easily recovered and require more time and money.
Mahmoud A. Lattouf
Domain Names Registration Officer
Transliteration is when trademarks are converted into a different character set from its original character in such a way that when the trademark is pronounced, the sound of the original character set is retained.