Speednames Offers New Service for Trademark Owners When Registering .biz Domain Names on q.speednames.com More Than 15 Million Trademarks Worldwide Can Benefit From the New Intellectual Property Claim Service COPENHAGEN, and SINGAPORE, May 18 /PRNewswire Asia-AsiaNet/ -- The leading digital domain name registrar Speednames today launched an Intellectual Property Claim Service for customers that already have queued or want to queue up for .biz domain names on q.speednames.com. The service is offered by the central registry behind .biz and Speednames, and will run from May 21 to July 9, 2001. "There are more than 15 million trademarks worldwide and many more common names or terms to which companies and individuals may have a valid claim. The new Top-Level Domain .biz is intended for businesses and before the registration of .biz is opened to the public, there will be a period in which companies and individuals will have a chance to make an Intellectual Property Claim. We have already queued up several thousand .biz domain names for our customers on q.speednames.com. We believe this new service will be very valuable for companies which market products and services on the Internet, and also for all the service companies offering protection of brands and trademarks for their customers," said Martin Roll, Vice President, Global Marketing & PR, Speednames. The claim filing will not guarantee the claimant their domain name, but it does help warn off so-called cybersquatters and others who might unknowingly infringe on another business' intellectual property. More important is the fact that the system, in warning off a potential registrant before the domain is registered, makes it a lot easier for a Claimer with a legitimate interest to prove that the registrant was in bad faith. The price for an IP Claim filing is US$140 per claim. There are no restrictions on the number of intellectual property owners that may file Trademark Claim Forms for a given domain name, but trademark owners can not submit a Trademark Claim Form after the Claim Period. It is necessary to submit applications for a .biz registration separately on q.speednames.com as the Intellectual Property Claim is not a registration application in itself. All registration requests on .biz domain names from Speednames will be submitted to a pool of domain name applications at the central registry behind .biz. These domain names will be processed randomly. This means that the chances of getting a domain name registered are increasing every time a domain name application is entered into the registration queue. About Speednames Speednames was established in 1999 and has become the most advanced international digital domain name registrar. With Speednames, customers can digitally search, register and manage their domain names in more than 115 different Top-Level Domains. The service runs in 9 European languages and in Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean and in soon in Japanese. The company recently introduced internationalised domain name registrations under .com, .net and .org, and Speednames is also offering a registration queue for the new Top-Level Domains .biz, .name and .info. Speednames has made more than 60 international partnerships with leading Telcos, Internet Service Providers and Internet Portals. Speednames is also part of a new consortium Afilias that has been selected by ICANN to operate an unrestricted Top-Level Domain -- .info -- giving choice beyond the current .com, .net and .org. SOURCE: Speednames CONTACT: Martin Roll, Speednames VP of Global PR, +45-33-55-08-08, or +65-235-4977, or [email protected], or Mervin Wang, +65-390-3342, or [email protected], or Lim Siow Joo, +65-390-3343, or [email protected], both of Hill & Knowlton Singapore, for Speednames Web Site: http://www.speednames.com http://q.speednames.com