Brand | Trademark

You never own a domain name. The registry issues a domain name and you pay an annual fee for it. As a business registrant, you are the rightful owner and as a private individual, you are the domain name holder.

A domain name is never owned by you. That right belongs to the registry. You have user rights. If you are a business user of a domain name, you are a Rightsholder. If you are a private individual, you are a Domain Name Holder.

You speak of trademark when you have protected the trademark. This can be, for example, a word trademark or a logo. Either for specific industries. A company name can be a trade name and multiple trade names can be associated with a company name. You cannot simply claim an existing domain name because it is the same as your company name or trade name. For domain names containing a word to which a trademark applies, there are various legal rules, and these are not always clear.

This is a clear form of internet abuse. People often enter a wrong website name, for example due to a typing or spelling error. There are parties that register domain names with such errors in the name in order to mislead visitors. In serious cases, there may even be deliberate fraud involved. Think of RAB0.nl, where the O is replaced by a zero. This may not always be immediately apparent, especially in the case of phishing emails.