Protect Your Brand Online

Brands are increasingly key to commercial success. It sets a company and their product offerings apart, and allows them to command attention in the marketplace.

Failing to pay timely attention to IP issues can do irreparable damage to a company’s brand and cost large amounts of time and money:

For example

• Ebay was forced to enter France under the domain name Ebayfrance.fr because a competitor had registered the company’s main brand under .fr (Ebay later paid $100 million to purchase the competitor)
• Amazon.gr, Amazom.com, Amazon.com.gr were all taken by bad-faith individuals or competitors
• Procedures are in place which allow legitimate trademark holders to extract domain names from illegitimate ones, but your company stands little chance against another good faith user

Advantages

• Ability to localize your marketing efforts with a top level domain (e.g. .DE, .FR) that people in national markets know and trust.
• Owning your domains in all relevant markets enables creation of a uniform brand across markets
• Once you have legitimately registered your domains, you need no longer worry about cybersquatters and bad-faith competitors.
• It is much cheaper to register domains upfront than wait until legal proceedings need to be initiated (ask yourself how many lawyer hours this offer will cover?)

Why shouldn’t I wait?

• The domain administrators (known as NICs) are relatively stable and the domains you purchase are therefore immediately useful for your branding purposes
• Many countries have had restrictions on domain registration by non-nationals. However, these restrictions have recently been lifted in Belgium and Italy, and similar liberalisation efforts are currently underway in Sweden and the Netherlands. Having local daughter companies and trademarks puts you in a privileged position because you can register your names BEFORE restrictions are lifted.
• Few companies have been able to offer our broad range of TLDs, and this offer makes you a fast mover in pan-European protection of your domain name.