CircleID

Chances are someone's already looking into this. But they're probably still working out the legalities and the market demand for such.

OTOH, some big firms (e.g. ven-cap) have covered this possibility via their registrar acquisitions.

This has been tried. Itwas a product of a company that I came across during Bubble 1.0

Domaintools.com already has historical whois data, and will also show blacklisting information on a domain. As for pending UDRP on a domain, the UDRP process should already have locked the domain.

The DomainTools data is a good start, which is why I mentioned NI is a potential provider of this service.  But it's not enough…

It is an interesting idea, but extremely difficult to put into practice.  How does the title company insure against trademark claims?  The overwhelming majority of trademarks are not exclusive, but based on dictionary words.  Often, there are multiple uses being made of even descriptive, ordinary words. 

Take the word "apple." There are 2053 trademark applications, live and dead marks containing some variant of the word "apple." There are fifty-five such marks dedicated to the word "apple," alone.  Vetting a domain name for possible use involves an investigation of existing uses of the root word(s) of the domain name by third party companies in their trademarks, and making certain that a proposed use will not violate existing rights.

Even so, there are many aggressive trademark owners that will sue to acquire a domain name, whether it is has been registered in bad faith, or used in an infringing or competitive manner, or not.  Although I agree that the idea of title insurance for domain names is an interesting one, the premiums would have to be prohibitively high to cover the risk inherent in insuring domain names. 

Traditional title insurance can look at a recorded chain of ownership to determine whether title has properly passed.  When dealing with the intersection of domain names with intangible property rights in trademarks, it is far more difficult to determine or predict whether a competing claim will ever be made. 

It may be more feasible to have a service that would insure simply the validity of the chain of ownership, dating back to the original owner, but even this raises issues not typically present in real estate transactions.  There is no formal record of domain name transfers—real property transactions are recorded at the county level.  Much would likely need to be changed about the way that domain names are bought and sold to make insuring them a viable idea.

Brett E. Lewis, Esq.
www.lewishand.com

Can anyone help me please?  How can I find out who the previous owners of a domain name are?  Any advice would be much appreciated.

Name Intelligence.  http://whois.domaintools.com/

You may need to set up an account.  They keep archived records of whois changes under "Domain History."

Brett Lewis
brett@lewishand.com

Domain insurance would at best pay for the high legal fees incurred trying to recover stolen domains; so why not instead find cheap solutions.

I set up TROANN.com so that people don't have to guess who really owns a domain and can now safely buy domains without having to worry about them being taken back or never transferred after payment is sent because your TROANN title certificate . Going by the WHOIS registry ownership can be change in an instant by anyone with account access at the registrar level. You might think your doing a ownership history search, but the registrar is going to stand by the current registrant because that is what they are contractually required to do under ICANN policy. TROANN relies on case law I helped make to supercede ICANN policy to stop domain owners from having to live with completely unnecessary risks. TROANN doesn't insure against threats and litigation regarding trademark rights, but I also have a patent pending that addresses that problem and TMclearinghouse.com will be up in about a month.

Anyone with a little time or questions, please check out TROANN and let me know what you think or tell me about a domain problem you have so I can improve these services. If the public can improve on the news and TV, then we can certainly fix unnecessary problems the establishment hasn't in over 10 years.