Exciting news at Blacknight, we’re now offering DPML for trademarks. What’s DPML? The Domains Protected Marks List program is a program on offer from Donuts Inc, the registry behind 241+ generic top-level domain names (gTLD’s). By signing up, you prevent your trademarked brand name from being registered across the entire portfolio of Donuts Inc domain names.
This way with DPML you don’t have to make 241+ defensive domain registrations to secure your trademarks against bad actors trying to hijack your intellectual property. With the proliferation of gTLD’s, there are now so many domains a business or organisation needs to register; it can become confusing and expensive very quickly. DPML by Blacknight makes it really easy – you pay one set fee for 5 or 10 years, and your trademark is blocked from registration across the entire Donuts gTLD portfolio (but not domains with other registries).
There are two options for this program. For the 5-year program, you can block one single exact-matched trademarked name/word/phrase from registration across the Donuts domain portfolio. With the 10-year program, you get everything from the 5-year program plus the ability to block misspellings of your trademark, plus homographic protection for domains that try to trick users with different characters or letter combinations. This alone covers tens of thousands of potential domain names (and saving you tens of thousands on defensive domain registrations). It also covers all future domains that might be offered by Donuts.
It’s excellent value for money for protection against phishing, trademark theft, and prevention against anyone pretending to be your business or organisation. With either the 5-year or the 10-year program, you pay one fee, upfront and that’s it. Once the program is set up, you don’t have to do anything more or even think about it. Your brand/trademark is protected. If you ever want to use one of the possible domains, you just have to tell your account manager, and it will be released for registration.
The key thing that makes all of this work is that you need an SMD file. An SMD file is a ‘Signed Mark Data’ file that has to be on file with the Trademark Clearinghouse. It’s like a password that allows you to act as the representative of a particular trademark. If you don’t have one, Blacknight can help you get one.
As an example of a use case, say you’re Major Film Studio and have a movie coming out with a particular trademark. Major Film Studio simply has to purchase DMPL for the trademarks they’ve registered for the film. Once that trademark has an SMD on file with the Trademark Clearinghouse, they can then block all potential registrations and combinations of that film name for the length of the DPML program. Then no one can register domains like ‘thisfilm.rocks’ or ‘thisfilm.reviews’ etc.
DPML by Blacknight is like buying a lock for your trademark so that no one else can register domains (operated by Donuts) with it and use it to damage your business or pretend to be you. Your online reputation is safer with DPML. For a complete list of domains covered by DPML, check out this list on the Donuts website.
Interested in getting DPML by Blacknight? Get in touch with the Blacknight Sales team today, and we’ll start the process!