Domain Name no-no’s. Interview with a Domain Name Lawyer
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at
9:46 pm
DomainsIntoDollars asked:
Phil Craig from www.DomainsIntoDollars.com interviews Domain Name and Trademark Lawyer, John B. Berryhill, PhD., about domain name and trademark issues … domain names domainer trademark law lawyer
Tagged with: Domain Name • Domain Trademark • Law Lawyer • Trademark Names
Filed under: Attorney Video
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My advice is to always try to do original marketing.
Riding on someone elses Trademark is for people without any creativity and automatically makes your business look B grade and ‘try hard’.
so what is when I use a domainname from a star??
COOL
However, if you purchase a name that is already part of a company’s product or business, then you are asking for trouble, even if it’s only a partial use of the name. It’s better to keep things generic and that way all rights to the domain name are yours. Likewise, if you come up with a name and a company then uses it, prior to registering the name as part of their product line, it is YOU that is entitled to compensation from any monies made on products marketed with that name, not the company!
If corporations want a name for a product or their business, then they should think of it first. If they don’t, then they should buy it from the owner, or make an offer on it, if it is in their interest to do so.
Bullying the single investor/owner of a name simply because they got it first must have some illegal implications tied into it?
After all, a corporation, like a private buyer, is a single entity, but it doesn’t have the right to ownership unless it buys first!
I think we need to stop bending over so much for large corporations. Look at the issue regarding Nissan. I’m sure it’s very rare that the small guy ever wins. If anything, I’d consider Nissan Motor’s actions as “in bad faith”, not the other way around.
I thought of a unique name to use, but a corporation is now using the same name for a product that’s yet to be released (I only found out searching it on Google lately). Am I going to have to forget about using the original name now, because down the road they may decide to bury me with legal papers, perhaps even accusing me of squatting? And even if my claim to the name is legitimate, what’s stopping them from dragging me to court anyway, causing excessive costs just for the legal battle alone?
This whole scenario disgusts me. What happens if you register a domain name, and a corporation later decides to use that name for a product of theirs instead. They then can come after you retroactively, and destroy everything you worked at, simply because they are a corporation with enough money that they could easily obtain another trademark in their bag of goodies?
This video was interesting, but I feel it neglects the underlying moral dilemma facing the trade: what right do these individuals have to domain name profiteering? Who does it help? Who does it hurt? Viewing the internet as an open market is shortsighted and dangerous to individual freedoms.
John is the best! (Hi MJ)
Best,
Dan