Legal Issues About Trademarks And Domain Names

With each country having its own trade mark system, the effect is the trademark system is territorial. So a brand name may be owned by one person in the United Kingdom and by another, totally unrelated, person in the United States. This article notes as the DNS puts “most of its emphasis on the .com title as the international domain, [this] does not really jive well with the trade mark system because of the latter’s fundamental definition of ‘ownership’.” The article uses as an example the domain prince.com where the sports good manufacturer Prince challenged a British computer consultancy who registered the name in good faith. The computer consultancy won the case. However it was different when Marks & Spencer challenged One In A Million who had registered the domains of registered trade marks such as Marks & Spencer, Sainsburys, Virgin and Cellnet for the express purpose of selling the domains to the trade mark holders. The High Court decided One In A Million relinquish their claim on the said domain names, a decision further upheld by the Court of Appeal. The concludes, in part “Based on the two actual court cases we can build up a clear picture about the interrelation of trademarks and domain names. In general, domains that have no trademark significance can be acquired by the entity who registered them first.”http://www.upublish.info/Article/Legal-issues-about-Trademarks-and-Domain-Names/17240