What is a protected name or trademark?

Under the ECSA, protected names and trademarks include:

  • Names or trademarks that have been entered into the trade register or into the registers of trademarks, associations, foundations, or political parties in Finland
  • Names of public bodies, unincorporated state enterprises, independent public corporations, public associations, or diplomatic missions of a foreign state or their bodies
  • Established names, secondary marks or trademarks referred to in the Business Names Act or Trademarks Act
  • EU trademarks entered into the EUIPO trademark register.

 

Where can I check my protected names and trademarks?

Protected names and trademarks can be checked in the following registers:

 

What is a lawful domain name?

At the time of registration, a domain name must not be:

  • based on a protected name or trademark owned by another party, unless the domain name holder can present a good, acceptable reason for registering the domain name.
  • similar to a protected name or trademark owned by another party, if the clear intent of registering the domain name is to benefit from it or to cause damage.

 

Characters allowed on .fi domain names

Allowed characters are the letters from a to z and the numbers from 0 to 9. In addition, allowed characters include native language characters å, ä and ö as well as characters in the Saami languages spoken in Finland and the hyphen-minus.

There are some technical restrictions a domain name containing native language characters. For instance not all email software understand domains with these characters. It is advised to order a domain name containing native characters and an equivalent domain name without native language characters, for example ääkkönen.fi and aakkonen.fi.

Punycode, also called ACE (ASCII Compatible Encoding), enables the use of characters outside the Latin alphabet. The domain name system can read a domain name consisting of native language characters, if it is technically defined as an ACE string. For example, the ACE string of ääkkönen.fi is xn--kknen-fraa=0m.fi.