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by mmahemoff 3814 days ago
Surely the resolution to any trademark conflict would be a domain transfer or not. "Let it lapse and end up with some other random owner" benefits only the lawyers.

That said, I can see why some owners may wish to immediately disavow a domain if they consider it to be a legal or reputational risk. In that case, it can simply be transferred to another owner, so I don't see why it would be a problem for anyone to renew it (though payment fraud might be a separate concern from some registrars).
2 comments
duskwuff 3814 days ago
Transferring a domain costs money (although not much); more importantly, it causes the domain to be renewed for an extra year. If the owner of the trademark doesn't want the domain to exist (e.g, if it's some off-brand use of their mark), having the domain transferred to them is counterproductive.
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apocalyptic0n3 3814 days ago
Just trying to understand this. Wouldn't that actually be good? Wouldn't the trademark owner want the domain so they could keep it unassigned? If they let it expire, someone could eventually purchase it and use it for similar purposes. That seems counterproductive to me, not transferring it.
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duskwuff 3814 days ago
> Wouldn't the trademark owner want the domain so they could keep it unassigned?

Consider a low-quality domain name like "buy-acme-widgets-cheap-123.com" (for the trademark "Acme"). There are so many possible domain names of that form that Acme Co. would have no real interest in trying to protect that specific one from being misused in the future.

Another messy situation would be if the domain name contained multiple trademarks belonging to different owners. The holder of one trademark would probably be reluctant to take ownership of a domain name which also infringed on another company's trademark!

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dwild 3814 days ago
Then they won't care if the settlement is to not use it. It will just point to nowhere...
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0x0 3814 days ago
If they lawyered up enough to get one party to agree to let it lapse, I'd say the outlook is not favorable for any copycats.
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toast0 3814 days ago
some TLDs (mostly ccTLDs) have onerous ownership requirements, it might be easier in that case to just have ann agreement to let it be dormant, given whatever circumstances.
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