Trademark Clearinghouse

The Trademark Clearinghouse (TMC) is a database of trademarks that was established by ICANN in order to enhance the protection of trademarks on the Internet. The TMC saves registrants from paying any kind of money for the data that needs to be validated again and again at several registries by paying multiple fees.

Role of TMC

The main role of TMC was to serve as a central repository for the information related to the rights of the trademark owners to be stored, authenticated and distributed.

Structure

The Trademark Clearinghouse is divided into two branches.

Validation Centre

The Trademark Clearinghouse's Validation Centre authenticates intellectual property rights (IPR) claims through research. It does this by reviewing other sources for unregistered rights which include the registered trade names for other countries where these trademarks are already protected or it directly approaches the trademark offices. The TMC also helps the applicants to rectify mistakes made in their IPR validation request. It provides each IPR validation request it finds to have a unique and correct case number and a ‘Verified’ status. It is responsible for awarding verified status and transferring the ‘Verified’ cases to the Data Centre using EPP/XML. The validation centre also revalidates the verified cases in the data centre.

The TMC doesn’t prioritize or bestow any advantage or disadvantage on any kind of request for IPR validation. It doesn’t reject IPR validation request only because the same term is owned by another party.

Data Centre

The Data Centre holds all the cases related to IPR validation, which have been given the ‘Verified’ status by the Validation Centre. It provides a reference number which works as an identification number for the term and owner. The Data centre also saves all the copies in Escrow and operates in a database known as the ‘WhoHas’ in which third party people can look up the records. It also supports any Accredited Registrar by providing a case reference number to it so that it can be used in a registration request. It also pushes lists of the ‘Verified’ cases to registries which are in accordance of the eligibility requirements of that registry. It also supports the IP Claims process by sending out the IP Claims whenever a third party applies for a ‘Verified’ term that is stored in the Data Centre. The Data Centre of the TMC doesn’t award the domain name registrations nor does it prioritize any ‘Verified’ case over the others. It also doesn’t provide disadvantage to any of the ‘Verified’ case as it is not ASCII script nor does it support front-running.

ICANN and TMC

As mentioned earlier, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) established the Trademark Clearinghouse. In its international meeting, ICANN announced the establishment of TMC for the sake of maintaining a database of Internet trademarks, which will improve the protection of trademarks. The Draft Applicant Guidebook published in November 2010 includes the role of the TMC in the process of applying for a new gTLD.