How to buy a domain name without creating a legal problem

Buying a domain takes about five minutes and costs around €12 a year. The part worth slowing down for is the check nobody does: whether the name is already registered as a trademark by somebody who will object once you start trading.

What am I actually buying?

A rental. You pay a registrar for the exclusive right to point one string of text at a server, and you keep it while you keep paying.

A domain is made of a second-level domain, the part you choose, and a top-level domain, the part after the dot. In adoraip.com, adoraip is the second level and .com is the top level.

You are not buying the name. You are buying that string on that extension. Domain name versus trademark sets out the difference, because it is the one that costs people money.

Which registrar?

Any accredited one. They all sell the same thing, and the differences that matter are:

• Renewal price, not the first-year price. A €1 first year followed by €40 renewals is common.
• Whether transfers out are easy. Some make leaving deliberately awkward.
• Whether WHOIS privacy is included or charged for.
• Whether they upsell hosting you do not need.

Buy the domain from one place and take hosting wherever suits you. Bundling them is convenient right up to the point where you want to change one.

Is the name available?

Search at the registrar. If the .com has gone, you have three options: pick a different name, pick a different extension, or try to buy it from whoever holds it.

Country extensions have their own rules, and some require a local presence or a local address. WIPO keeps a database of country-code domain practices that is worth checking before you commit to one.

You can see who holds a registered domain through ICANN Lookup, though privacy services hide most individual registrants now.

The step people skip

Check the name against trademark registers before you build anything on it.

Domain availability tells you one thing: nobody has taken that exact string on that exact extension. It tells you nothing about whether the name is a registered trademark in your sector.

The two systems do not talk to each other. A name can be free on every extension and still belong to somebody as an EU trademark, who can then stop you using it and, if the circumstances fit, take the domain from you.

Search TMview for a first look. It is free and covers most registers. For anything you are going to invest in, a clearance search with a written opinion costs €358 across the EU and tells you what the raw results mean.

Registering it

Buy it, then do three things immediately:

1. Turn on auto-renew. Expired domains get bought within minutes by people who watch for them.
2. Turn on WHOIS privacy, unless a registry requires public details.
3. Turn on the registrar lock, which blocks unauthorised transfers.

Use an email address that is not on the domain itself for the account. If the domain lapses and the mailbox goes with it, recovering the account becomes much harder.

After you have it

Renewals. Diary them separately from the registrar's reminders. Most domain losses are administrative, not adversarial.

Registration in your name. Register in the company's name, not a developer's or an agency's. Recovering a domain from a former contractor is a genuinely difficult dispute, because it is a contract argument rather than a clear case of bad faith.

Transfers. Moving between registrars needs the domain unlocked and an authorisation code. Most registries impose a 60-day lock after registration or a change of ownership.

If somebody already has the domain that matches your brand

If you hold trademark rights and the holder registered it in bad faith, a UDRP complaint can transfer it to you. It takes about two months and there is no court involved.

Before you contact them, read what to do first. Approaching a domain holder yourself usually raises the asking price, and your message can be used against you in the complaint.

Related: three common trademark myths.