Insurance? There’s a (Patent) App for That. — Domain Title

Application filed nearly a decade ago covers domain name title insurance.

Over the past few years, a number of domain industry experts have been calling for domain name title insurance. The basic idea is that a title search would be run on previous owners of a domain name to make sure it hasn’t been stolen, and insurance issued. A domain buyer (or financier) could use this to warrant against buying a stolen domain.

So I was surprised to see that someone thought of this a decade ago and filed a patent application on the idea.

U.S. Application Ser. No. 10/301,206 was filed November 21, 2002 for “Intellectual Property Asset Title Insurance”, based on a provisional patent application filed in 2001. (The same inventors filed a divisional patent that was published today.) It describes a method for creating title insurance for a number of intellectual property asset classes, counting domain names.

I’m not sure if there’s a market for domain name title insurance yet, but it would certainly open up the finance community to lending more on domain names and give domain buyers peace of mind.