March 1st 2011 |  Christmas Island, Australia

The ClearingHouse for Intellectual Property (CHIP) and trademark (TM) EPP extensions are now available in the CoCCA Registry Software. The Council of Country Code Administrators ( COCCA) Registy software is available as open source and is the most widely deployed registry solution in use today.  CoCCA is used by the managers of over 30 ASCII and IDN Top Level Domians, with half a dozen more currently in the process of migrating.

CHIP is a new technology that is designed to allow trademark owners to efficiently and effectively safeguard and enforce their rights on the Internet, and in particular in the domain name space. CoCCA and IP Clearinghouse, the company that operates CHIP, have collaborated to allow trademark owners to retroactively (or proactively) associate trademark information with specific domain names in the following country-code extensions: .AF, .CX, .GS, HT,.KI, .NF, .SB and .TL .

Other TLDs will follow pending the outcome of the inital trial.

The trademark information that has been provided and validated through CHIP will be made available via the registry WHOIS and historical abstracts. The main benefits for brand owners include the following:

• new registrations made using CHIP codes between March 15th and June 15th 1st will receive a 20% discount on the registration fee charged by CoCCA - it is hoped that this discount will provide registrars with a financial incentive to adopt the CoCCA EPP Extensions; and

• trademarks that have been validated through CHIP will shortly obtain the opportunity to activate a so-called IP claims service, whereby CHIP will notify brand owners if a third party registers a domain name that corresponds with their validated brands in one of these extensions.

For more information and regular updates, please visit http://www.ipclearinghouse.org