Trademark Watching

• New registrations containing the brand, a product name, or a chosen keyword, exactly or with the usual variations: typos, added words, hyphens, other scripts.
• Existing domains already identified as a risk: change of holder, of registrar or of name servers, which often precedes a live site.
• Country code domains first. Local infringers register local extensions. A watch limited to generic extensions misses them; ours covers the country code domains of our catalogue.

Each alert comes with the domain name, a link to the website if one is active, and the public registration record. Periodic reports group the alerts by brand and by extension, with the status of each case: new, under review, action started, closed. The report is written for the person who has to decide, not for a technician: what was registered, by whom when the record shows it, whether a site is live, and what it looks like.

Not every alert calls for action. For each one we recommend one of five answers:

• Ignore. A legitimate use, an unrelated business, a common word.
• Monitor. A registered name with no site; we keep watching for a change.
• Write. A cease-and-desist letter, often enough when the holder acts in good faith.
• Recover. A dispute procedure or a court action when the name infringes your trademark and is used in bad faith; see our domain recovery service.
• Buy. Sometimes the cheapest way to close a case, through an intermediary so that the price does not rise with your name.

The same watch covers the domains you already hold: an expiry date coming without a renewal, a change of name servers nobody ordered, a registrar lock removed. These signals catch mistakes and hijacking attempts early, when they cost nothing to fix. They are reported in the same place as the infringements, so that one person sees the whole picture of the brand online.

Registrars and law firms can offer the watch to their clients as a white-label service: they add their clients' brands themselves, the reports carry their own logo, and the alerts reach the people they choose. Recovery actions, when needed, follow through our legal department or through their own counsel.

A company with a strong brand in Germany, Brazil or Vietnam is copied in .de, .com.br or .vn long before it is copied in generic extensions, because that is where its customers look. The watch therefore starts with the countries where you sell and the extensions of your domain strategy, and widens from there.