alt Hacker NewsA similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it.
When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also never refunded me for the money already paid to lease the domain for a year. Overall it was a bad experienced with bad communication that made me switch registrar (note: this was a different registrar than mentioned here).
I think one of the problems is that as more and more individual consumers buy domains, certain legal processes and automation are not ready for that. A good registrar should anticipate that an individual private consumer may not have the legal experience or knowledge to deal with just being hit with something they were never explicitly warned of.
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> I think one of the problems is that as more and more individual consumers buy domains
Huh, I was always under the assumption that the percentage of domains bought by individual consumers is shrinking. As in, in the early days of the internet until ~2010 where commercialization was only slowly picking up (or only concentrated to a few domains), the majority of domains were personal websites and blogs.
Trademarks are country specific while domain names are not. Would be interesting to know what happens if they took this to trial (in which country though).
Which registrar was this? I’d like to avoid them.
“iwantmyname”, from leafo’s post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364033
> When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good.
I don't think this is good.
Trademarks are country-specific, not global like domains. Further, within a country trademarks are only valid within the scope of certain classes, which means:
* There will often be more than one trademark holder of even non-surname trademarks.
* You can't trademark a surname to prevent its use generally, you can only restrict its use in a narrow sphere.
I understand why domain registrars automatically overenforce their country's trademark laws (they can't deal with the legal complications that will result from them not doing so), but it's very much not good that someone like you can get to a domain for your surname first and be told you can't have it in case the trademark holder (for which class???) might want it.