Way to offload your infringing domain names? — A safe

Lawyer lets you offload your trademark-infringing domain names.

Regarding five years ago I was talking to a domainer who had some trademark-infringing domains in his portfolio. He didn’t want them. He just wanted to get rid of them.

“What if there was a service where you could push your infringing domains to and they’d take care of it?” he asked. “You just transfer your domains and they put up a notice on the domain that the trademark owner can claim their domain at no charge.”

It was an interesting idea. Especially since it’s not always easy to merely delete a registration.

It turns out there is an attorney that will do that for you.

And the way I found out regarding it will be humorous to domainers.

I was reading regarding the fresh gTLD trademark clearinghouse today. The official web site for the clearinghouse is Trademark-Clearinghouse.com. (I know, a hyphen. Right?)

So naturally I wanted to figure out who owned the better domain TrademarkClearinghouse.com.

It’s owned by Louisiana attorney David Nance. Nance was formerly in-house counsel to DirectNIC and Parked.

Nance offers a service for people who think they own an potentially infringing domain name:

If you suspect that one or more of your domain names may violate someone else’s trademark or service mark, you can avoid risk while your domain dispute is being resolved by following these 2 simple steps:

1. Forward your domain name to http://www.trademarkclearinghouse.com
2. Change the REGISTRANT of the domain(s) to TM Clearing House, LLC

Of course, Nance would like you to use his services to defend the name (if that’s warranted.)

If you want nothing at all to do with the domain, you can go a step further:

But if you do not want to try to keep your domain name, simply email us to arrange to have the domain name transferred to one of our registrar accounts and we will deal with anyone claiming prior rights. If we are eventually successful in the mark infringement dispute, you have the option to recover the domain name for $1000.00.