Trademark
A legally protected mark identifying a brand's goods or services, central to many domain disputes.
- glossary
A trademark is a legally registered word, phrase, logo, or symbol that identifies the goods or services of one party and distinguishes them from others — and it sits at the center of most domain-name disputes. When a domain matches a protected mark and the registrant cannot show a legitimate interest, the trademark owner can pursue recovery through UDRP arbitration administered by bodies like WIPO, through cybersquatting claims, or via the US ACPA. The Trademark Clearinghouse lets rights-holders pre-register with ICANN to receive early-warning notices when matching names are applied for in new gTLDs. Tokenization does not exempt a domain from trademark law: an NFT representing a domain is still subject to UDRP and ACPA proceedings, and a court or panel can order the underlying DNS registration transferred regardless of who holds the on-chain token. Domain investors and speculators should always run a trademark clearance search before acquiring a name that might correspond to an existing brand.
Related keywords
- trademark
- brand protection
- intellectual property
- domain dispute
- UDRP
- WIPO
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.