The Sunrise Period for name.pk Domains
June 14, 2005
The two & three character domain names under .PK are not available (without .com.pk etc suffix)
Rev 1.0
Owners of registered trademarks or service marks who wish to protect their marks will be given the opportunity to apply for .PK domain names (without .com.pk suffix, e.g. name.pk) before the general public so that their intellectual property rights may be protected. This period is known as the Sunrise Period. The Sunrise Period for .PK is derived from ICANN’s documents about the Sunrise Period startup Plan.
Not First-Come First Served Basis: To prevent preferential treatment of any single registrant, registrations submitted during the Sunrise Period will not be processed in real time, nor on a first-come, first-served basis. All applicants have an equal chance of registration of any specific domain as long as a valid domain application is sent within the first thirty days after the start of the Sunrise Period.
Standard Dispute Resolution: The Sunrise Period is a mechanism to minimize the trademark infringement disputes for the .PK domain name registration, but it is not a substitute for the standard dispute resolution procedures. All domains registered during the Sunrise Period are open to dispute claims, after the end of the Sunrise Period.
SUNRISE PERIOD: The sunrise process for .PK trademark domains will start on July 15th, 2005 and lasts until Sept 15, 2005. This will be followed by open registration without trademark restrictions. The schedule for the open registration will be posted on the PKNIC website on September 1, 2005.
COMPLIANCE
In order to be considered valid, a Sunrise application must meet all of the following criteria, in addition to the criteria described elsewhere in this document:
During this Sunrise Period, owners of any current (non-expired) trademark or service mark registration having national effect (including, for example, European Community Trademarks (CTMs) but excluding United States “State” registrations) that issued prior to January 1, 2005 will be eligible to register a domain name that is identical to the textual or word elements of such trademark or service mark, using ASCII characters only, and subject to the same character and formatting restrictions described below. Trademark or service mark registrations from the supplemental or equivalent Registry of any country, or from individual states or provinces of a nation, will not be accepted. A subsidiary or parent company of a trademark owner entity may also apply if they are authorized by the trademark owner to register domain names for its trademarks.
Where there is a space or punctuation mark between the textual elements of a mark, the Registrant may elect at their discretion to use a hyphen or combine the elements together. For example, the mark "SERVICE MARK" could be registered as servicemark.pk or service-mark.pk. An ‘&’ in the trademark may be substituted with ‘And’ or be absent from the domain name. To allow for multiple valid configurations of a domain name based on a trademark, the above rule may be relaxed as long as the derivation is obvious, includes all the textual elements (optionally excluding punctuations and conjunction words And, &, etc), and does not broaden or narrows down the scope of the name outside the trademark. The following table shows an example of a trademark and the domain names that may be derived from it, and domain names that are not allowed based on this trademark.
Trademark : John & Rich Tyres
Acceptable Domain names: john-rich-tyres.pk, johnAndRichTyres.pk, johnRichTyres.pk, johnRich-tyres.pk, johnAndRich-Tyres.pk, john-rich-tyres.pk, johnAndRichTyres.pk, johnRichTyres.pk, johnRich-tyres.pk, johnAndRich-Tyres.pk, etc…
Unacceptable Domain names: jrt.pk, john.pk, rich-Tyre.pk, tyre.pk, john-rich.pk, johnAndRich.pk, etc.
No applications for domain names in internationalized script (including diacritical marks) shall be accepted. The domain name applied for must be represented in ASCII characters only.
Only characters in the range A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9 and hyphens will be accepted in a domain name. Names cannot begin or end with a hyphen.
The maximum length is 67 characters (inclusive of the .pk portion).
The minimum length for the domain name, exclusive of the .pk portion is four characters (e.g. 1234.pk) . A four character name before .pk can not start with one of the PKNIC second level sub-domains (e.g. com, net, org, gov, gop, etc.). For example the following domain names are not acceptable: (coms.pk, comm.pk, nets.pk, net2.pk, govs.pk, etc). The complete list of the .PK current and reserved sub-domains are .COM.PK .NET.PK .EDU.PK .ORG.PK .FAM.PK .BIZ.PK .WEB.PK .GOV.PK .GOB.PK .GOK.PK .GON.PK .GOP.PK .GOS.PK, .INFO.PK
No generic dictionary single words in English or Urdu language (Roman encoding) will be acceptable for the trademark based registration during the Sunrise Period, even if it matches a registered trademark. Such domain names may be registered after the Sunrise Period, by complying with the registration rules and procedures at that time.
The Sunrise Period requirements and procedures do not apply to the third level domains, e.g. name.com.pk, and they will continued to be registered during and after the Sunrise Period, according to the existing rules and procedures.
Sunrise domains will only be accepted for a registration term of a minimum of five years, and up to a maximum of ten years. After the initial five, or more, year registration period, the renewals of these domain names will be based on a minimum of two year periods.
The domain name is not present in the list of reserved or blocked names.
Applications must conform to general PKNIC registration policies. In the case of difference between the PKNIC registration policy and the Sunrise Period terms and conditions, the Sunrise Period terms and conditions will apply. Domain names are not required to have preconfigured name servers for them.
In addition to the domain name and applicant data the following information will be required for domain registration:
ASCII character name of the mark
Date the trademark or service mark registration was issued
Expiry Date for the trademark
Country where the trademark was issued
Registration number
Trademark or Service Mark Document Copy (Image)
The domain registrant (trademark holder) may assign its agent to act as the Admin, Technical and Billing Contacts for the purpose of domain registrations.
The trademark holder must submit proof of its trademark or service mark to the SAFENAMES for verification. The proof to be submitted is in the form of an electronic image file (.PDF, .JPG or .GIF) of the trademark or service mark certificate (or equivalent document from the trademark issuing office). SAFENAMES reserves the right to ask for a fax or a paper certified/notarized copy of the trademark or service mark document from any applicant for the verification purposes.
A mechanism to submit multiple domain using a spreadsheet, and multiple documents using an archive ZIP file may be available at the start of the Sunrise Period.
DOCUMENT WAIVER: If a registrar or agent is submitting registration applications, on behalf of its clients, for many different trademarks, then a waiver may be requested to withhold submitting of trademark documents (image) for all the applications after the first batch of the document images have been submitted. The waiver request is considered on a case by case basis, and if a waiver is granted, the document (image, or certified copy) is only required when requested by the automated registration system, or by PKNIC reviewing staff. The waiver application will be available from PKNIC at the start of the Sunrise Period.
PROCESSING: During the Sunrise Period, SAFENAMES expects a large number of registrations. To prevent preferential treatment of any single registrant, registrations submitted during the Sunrise Period will not be processed in real time, or on a first-come, first-served basis. Instead, PKNIC will accept registrations over two randomized Queuing Periods. After the end of the each queue period, the queue order of all the received applications requests is randomized. SAFENAMES will process domain name requests using a round-robin mechanism such that no more than one registration request per round-robin will be processed for any applicant, whether such registration request is accepted or not, so long as more than one applicants have requests remaining in its queue. One request is comprised of one trademark with one or more matching domain names for that mark. A domain name request will be considered successful if: (i) the domain name is available; and (ii) the registrant has sufficient funds in its account for the registration; and (iii) if the trademark is of foreign origin, there is no application in that Queuing Period with verifiable trademark issued by the Pakistan Trademark & Patent Office; and (iv) has passed the compliance and review for that domain application. This round robin process will continue until all domain name requests in each individual queue have been processed.
Queuing Period 1: July 15 to August 14th 2005
Queuing Period 2: August 15 to September 14th 2005
REVIEW: PKNIC will review some or all of the domain application during the Sunrise Period to check the compliance of the Sunrise rules, and to verify some, or all, of the trademark documents submitted with the application. Note that PKNIC does not have any obligation to conduct full trademark verification for every domain application, and thus the PKNIC review is only intended to reduce the potential misrepresentation or non-compliance. Any domain application that fails the compliance review or document verification (if requested by PKNIC) will be rejected. All domain registered, including those in the Sunrise Period, are open to challenge with the general Dispute Resolution methods or by remedies available by a court of law with proper jurisdiction.
REGISTRATION: If the name is awarded, the information provided by the trademark holder will be recorded and available by PKNIC Domain lookup in order to facilitate the verification of asserted marks by third parties. The results of both Queuing rounds will be available after the end of the Sunrise Period. Due to the potential manual review of each domain application, the results will be posted as soon as available at the end of the Sunrise Period, depending on the application volume. For the domains with unsuccessful registrations, information will be available to the applicant about who registered those domains (for possible challenge).
TRADEMARK PREFERENCE: The trademark issued by the Pakistan Trademark and Patent office will have preference over those issued in other countries, if these applications with the same domain name are submitted in the same round of processing. The preference will be granted only if the application for domain for a Pakistan issued trademark is accompanied with a notarized copy of the trademark document (to be received by postal or courier service before the end date of the processing round). As per the REVIEW section above, PKNIC reserves the right to require any applicant to produce a trademark certificate, issued by the Trademark Office.
SUNRISE CHALLENGE PERIOD: At the end of the Sunrise Period, when the registrations are finalized and made public, there will be a four weeks appeal period. A Challenger seeking transfer of the Domain Name is required to demonstrate, as part of the administrative proceeding and as a condition for such transfer, the Challenger’s compliance with the Sunrise registration conditions. The Sunrise challenge process will be published at the start of the Sunrise Period.