Trademark Protection for Chinese Domain Names

Abstract

Since the New Generic Top-level Domain (New gTLD) Program of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have carried out for some time, Chinese New gTLD and IDN have attracted a lot of attention from related stakeholders. At the same time, the protection for brand’s domain name and intellectual property rights are undergoing a severe situation because of the huge character space of IDN and greatly expanded Domain Name System (DNS). In order to protect interests of trademark holders, ICANN developed the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) schema. But the TMCH is based on exact string-matching, its protection scope for trademarks is limited. Based on these facts, we put forward a new solution for Chinese trademark protection in this paper. First construct three libraries of similar Chinese characters by using computer vision and machine learning techniques. Then generate similar Chinese domain names of a given brand domain name using three similar-character libraries and calculate similarity of similar domain names. Next query the WHOIS server for registration information to see whether domain names have been registered. These can support our services like Chinese IDN similarity evaluation, domain name recommendation and trademark brand counterfeiting detection, thus provide a more comprehensive protection for Chinese trademarks.