.IN DOMAIN REGISTRATIONS
IN INDIA
The Ministry of Information
Technology, Government of India, with effect from January 1, 2005 has
liberalized the policies for registration of country code Top Level Domains
(ccTLDs). According to this policy, it will now be possible for the registered
trade mark and service mark owners to register their trade / service marks as
secondary level domain names along with the top level domain name in India
which is .in. It is also possible for the trade mark owners to register domain
names with their trade marks at the third level along with the second and top
level domain name .co.in. To give an example, it will now be possible to
register domain name Yahoo.in and Yahoo.co.in, subject to Yahoo being a registered trade/service mark in India.
In the past, only registrations
were permitted with the secondary and top level domains .co.in. These registrations were only granted to companies having an
Indian subsidiary. These norms have now been relaxed and even entities not
having a presence in India can register these domains.
The Government of India
has also announced a Sunshine Period from January 1, 2005 to January 21, 2005, during which period
registrations shall be granted only to the registered trade mark owners and not
to other parties. After the Sunshine Period, registration shall be opened to the general public.
In order to deter cyber squatters, we highly recommend that
clients apply for registration of domain names in relation to all their
registered trade marks for the country code Top Level Domains .in and .co.in.
To this effect, our charges will be the same what we charge in
relation to new trade mark applications i.e. US$ 210. There shall be an
additional charge of US$ 110, which is the amount payable to the accredited
Registrar as the official fee for registration and subsistence of the
registration for an initial period of 5 years. Should you be interested in
registering these domains, please contact us and we shall provide you with more
details about the registration process.
