.ASIA Sunrise Phases 2B, 2C and 3 Now Open
Sunrise Phase 2B (General Registered Marks), Sunrise Phase 2C (Extended Protection) and Sunrise Phase 3 (Registered Entity Names) for .ASIA began November 13 and will be open through January 15, 2008. VeriSign will accept Sunrise applications through January 11, 2008, to ensure that all requests are submitted before the registry deadline.
Based on feedback from the intellectual property rights community, the registry has published several addendum which provide additional considerations for Sunrise Phase 2C and Sunrise Phase 3, along with some clarifications for the general Sunrise process.
For Sunrise 2C, Acceptable Extensions have been broadened to include words and phrases used in the described goods and services for a Registered Mark, especially where a mark is registered with a trademark office that does not implement the Nice Classification system. Acceptable Extensions will also include the combination of two or more Registered Marks in their entirety (Exact Match and Acceptable Match).
For Sunrise Phase 3, the Acceptable Match considerations allow for initials and short forms of an Entity Name, as well as the omission of locality indications (e.g. the city, prefecture, province or country identifiers included in a Registered Entity Name). Sunrise Phase 3 has also expanded to include requests allowing for transliteration or Romanization of non-English trademarks to allow non-Latin based language trademark owners to protect their names before the general public has a chance to register them. In addition, applicants with registered marks that contain an existing extension (e.g., .com) as a suffix can omit that suffix in the domain name request. The registry will also accept applications based on exact matches for domain names that are the subject of a UDRP proceeding decision.
Complete details and requirements for each phase can be found on the .ASIA Web site and the Sunrise Addendums.
