Introduction
This guide covers professional services related to brands and corporate domain portfolio management:
1. Domain portfolio registrar
Portfolio management services are offered by some registrars to corporates.
These services primarily consists of managing the domains on behalf of their owners, i.e. registering new domains and renewing existing domains on time while keeping their data up to date.
Note that the management can be fully outsourced.
It can also be partially outsourced, allowing owners to perform some updates such as nameservers changes. This is a kind of a dual-management.
These portfolio registrars can also use some monitoring tools as part as their management work. For instance, an alert can be generated when a change occur on some registration data.
Note that the provider managing the portfolio may register some client's name under his own name.
Consequently, the actual owner of such domain will not be visible in the Whois data.
This technique offers a stronger privacy protection than the masking of some Whois data (along with the domain privacy option or as a result of GDPR)
Such privacy is especially appropriate to securely prepare the introduction of any new brands.
2. Brand monitoring
This service allow to detect possible possible trademark infringement and registration of the protected brand name.
Then, the trademark owner can decide what, if any, action to take against such third-party infringing registrations.
3. Litigation and dispute services
Domain name disputes, similarly to trademark disputes, may require services provided by attorneys specialized in intellectual property rights.
The two major dispute resolution policies are:
UDRP: Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy
URS: Uniform Rapid Suspension
4. Trademark registration
A registered trademark provides several advantages to the trademark holder. It allows:
to register the trademark with the TMCH, as well as benefiting from blocking services.
to be equipped for domain disputes as well as against cybersquatting
to register domains (matching the trademark name) ending with some extensions
IP (Intellectual Property) firms may offer many addition services along with a trademark registration, such as trademark monitoring, legal services, and other kind of registrations (patents, etc.).