Claims Plus Service

The Identity Digital Claims Plus service is an optional, partial continuation of the ICANN mandated Claims Services that reaches beyond the required 90 day Claims Period and provides registrars with the ability to continue providing Claims Notices to customers prior to their registration of a domain name.

Once the mandated Claims Period expires in a TLD, the full suite of Claims Services will be “turned off.” Following this period, Identity Digital Claims Plus service will be available to registrars as an opt-in service. Claims Plus is not mandatory and only affects the opt-in registrar’s operations and customers.

The subdomain claimsplus.zone will be used to service claims notices in Claims Plus. Registrars opting into Claims Plus will be permitted to query for claims keys in claimsplus.zone.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example: the 90 day Claims Period for .bike has expired and an end-user wants to register delta.bike. A Claims Plus registrar, who wishes to show this end-user a claims notification, can query delta.claimsplus.zone to determine if “delta” is subject to a trademark claim registered with the Trademark Clearinghouse. If the term “delta” is on the Trademark Claims notification list, the Identity Digital SRS will provide the claims key information to the registrar. The registrar may then use that claims key to collect the Claims Notice from the TMCH.

Important note: It is not necessary to send back to Identity Digital the matching claims key to complete the registration outside the 90 day mandatory Claims Period. If the Registrar sends in the claims extension along with the create command in a TLD that has passed the 90 day Claims Period, an “invalid phase” error will occur.

The Claims Plus service does not notify the TMCH that a domain registration subject to claims has occurred. Following the Claims Period for each new gTLD, however, the Trademark Clearinghouse is offering a free Ongoing Notifications service through which Trademark Holders can elect to be notified of potential intellectual property infringement indefinitely, beyond the original 90 day period. Learn more at http://trademark-clearinghouse.com/content/ongoing-notifications.

At this time there is no fee for Claims Plus, however, this is contingent upon the position taken by the TMCH. Should the TMCH charge Identity Digital for this service, we will pass the charges through to registrars at cost. As mandated in our agreement with ICANN, trademark holders may not be charged for the service.

Please contact techsupport@identity.digital with any questions.

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