Sunrise Period for Russian Cyrillic Domain Ends Mid-September

The sunrise period for the registration of the Russian Cyrillic .РФ domain names is underway, ending on September 16, 2010. From November 25, 2009 to March 25, 2010 the Russian Federation allowed priority registration on behalf of Russian state authorities. From March 25 to May 12, 2010, trademark owners whose trademarks (word elements) contained Russian Cyrillic were able to submit applications.

On May 12, 2010, the registration became available to all trademark owners. On July 15, 2010 several new categories of users were added:

• Exclusive owners of company names, officially registered in Russia,
• Exclusive owners of geographical indications of origin;
• Non-profit organizations officially registered Russia;
• Mass media owners officially registered in Russia before May 12, 2010.

For trademark owners, the application for priority registration should be submitted with a copy of the trademark certificate and a copy of the legal entity certificate or an entrepreneur registration certificate. If the application is based on an international trademark registration, a certificate showing that the registration is valid in Russia should also be submitted.

It is possible to register a domain name corresponding to a trademark that is not written in Russian Cyrillic. In this case, the non-Russian Cyrillic trademark or part of the trademark may be transcribed or transliterated, at the discretion of the trademark owner, into Russian Cyrillic.

In case a trademark name includes endings such as “.RU” or “.COM”, etc. or their transliteration (“.РУ”, “.КОМ”, etc.), the rights holder may exclude the endings from a domain name. The spaces in the word element can also be deleted or replaced with hyphens.

For example, a trademark holder of “ABCD.RU” can register the following domain names:

• абцд.рф
• абцдру.рф
• абцд-ру.рф

According to DomainNews.com, around 15,000 domain names have already been registered and it is expected that there will be more than 50,000 domain names registered by mid-September. In late 2010, the .РФ domain names will be available to the general public throughout the world.

More information on the priority registration rules and procedures is available here.

For more information, please contact Taras Kulbaba or Jelena Jankovic.

Source: Russian Coordination Center