With the hype surrounding .XXX continuing to grow, the New TLD is dominating Domain News sites. New announcements regarding the TLD are being made on a regular basis by many adult organisations supporting the TLD, companies planning to protect their brand, and occasionally people who are still opposed to the idea.

It seems the Free Speech Coalition still falls into the group of people who are very much against the idea of .XXX, and they are once again making their views known. The Coalition have always been publicly against the ICM Registry’s plans for the New TLD, and went as far as organising a protest at the recent ICANN meeting held in San Francisco. This wasn’t exactly a resounding success however, as only twenty five people turned up to bother protesting. The Coalition also wrote a letter to ICANN back in 2010 attempting to prevent ICM getting the New TLD approved. Many of the claims in this letter were then refuted by Stuart Lawley, the ICM Registry CEO, and the New TLD was later approved.

Nevertheless, they haven’t been deterred, and the Coalition are now providing a template “Trademark Protection Letter” so adult webmasters are able to send it to the ICM Registry to place them “on notice”.

The letter supposedly informs ICM the sender will consider any infringement of their trademark in the .XXX name space “actionable” and expresses concerns over the “certainty of cyber-squatting and exploitation of established trademarks” by .XXX registrants. It then goes on to explicitly state that the Registry do not have permission to sell the .XXX version of the sender’s trademarks.

Although this letter is supposed to be a “one size fits all”, the Coalition do stress that it should be discussed with a lawyer before being sent. A number of lawyers have dismissed the letter already, stating that it isn’t technically correct, as it is the use of a domain that qualifies infringement, not the registration alone.

It seems strange that a company would choose to send a generic letter that would potentially end in a costly legal battle, rather than just registering their trademark in .XXX themselves. ICM have already provided extensive measures to ensure registrants have the opportunity to protect their existing brands during the Sunrise period. An applicant is eligible for this stage if they have an existing adult site on another TLD, an adult trademark, or a non-adult trademark. If you're a member of the adult community, then your application at this stage gives you the ability to block your chosen domain from being registered by anyone else. This allows you to protect your brand, but the domain will not be eligible for use with a live site.

It wouldn’t surprise me if a few years down the line many members of the Free Speech Coalition do end up owning a .XXX domain, but they will have no doubt paid a lot more in legal fees to recover it, rather than just paying the cost of a Sunrise Application…

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