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Trademark Claims Notice

According to the Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements, when registering domains during the Trademark Claims Period, ICANN-accredited registrars must:

  1. Check to determine if a potential domain name registration matches a record in the Trademark Clearinghouse;
  2. Display a claims notice to the potential domain name registrant (and receive acknowledgement from the potential registrant to proceed with the domain name registration if such records exist); and
  3. Provide claims notices in the form specified in the Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements [PDF, 168 KB], in real time at the time of the potential registration, in English and without cost to the potential domain name registrant.

Additional information is in the Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements [PDF, 168 KB].

This contractual obligation does not apply to any ccTLD (such as .us, .de, or .uk) or to gTLDs not subject to the Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements.

If you have a complaint regarding a registrar failing to comply with the trademark claims notice requirements, please submit a Registrar Standards Complaint Form.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."