Hello,
I'm new here. I found this forum when I did a search for Thumbs.db. The forum discussion answered my question. Thanks to y'all as I did not know why Thumb.db suddenly appearing on my web sites.
My question concerns Trademarks. Has anyone registered thier site names? For instance "TexasPDQ" web site, (not a real site)
I recently attempted to registed the name of my site online. I clicked Submit after answering all of the questions, but it did not give any indication that my submission went thru okay or what.
There is much confusion over Trademarks. You can have a trademark under common law just by saying you have a trademark. "This is my trademark." You get a Registered Trademark when it is submitted to the government.
This matter may seem unnecessary since you already have a domian name, but if your domain name is TexasPDQ.org that does not stop anyone from using TexasPDQ.net. If your registered Trademark is TexasPDQ then at least they may not Title their website TexasPDQ.
This is an important issue for me because an attempt was recently made to claim the name TexasPDQ when I have been using it first.
Has anyone had experience with registering their web site name as a Trademark or declaring one under common law?

Hi Charlesnv,

It doesn't hurt to register your domain name as a trademark, and doing so provides others with notice that the trademark exists.

Trademarks can be registered on a federal level, and a state level, and as you noted, can be common law. A common law trademark is as valid as the others, but it doesn't have the benefit of making it easy for others who might want to use the name to know that a trademark already exists. There are also some statutory limits in civil suits against people who infringe others trademarks, and the amount possible as damages is greater if you do have a federal registration.

There's some great information about trademarks as they relate to domain names on a web site which is a joint venture between a number of law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It's here:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/trademark/

We've had a few people bidding on the registered trademark for one web site in search engines, and sent them cease and desist letters with the information that the site name is a registered federal trademark. That helped to stop them from doing that.

I am piggy backing on this post. I have a trademark out there currently for my name that I am using. Do you know if this will cover my domain as well? I don't think so,but just checking. My domain is a portion of thename I trademarked.....any ideas.

Hi donnajay,

Trademark protection doesn't automatically apply to domain name usage, but if you have been using a domain name in commerce, you may have a common law trademark for the name. Registering the domain name version of the trademark is certainly something that you can do.

Maybe the biggest area where trademarked names and domain names can interact on the web is cybersquatting, where someone registers a domain name using a trademarked name, primarily for purposes of trying to sell the name to the trademark owner. In the case of cybersquatting, there is some protection.

Some people register some variations of their domain names to keep people from using different versions of their name - covering the most popular tlds, such as .com, .net, .org, etc. They may also register variations on the domain name itself, to keep other people from using them. If you are tempted to so that, you'll want to avoid making it so that the site resolves as a duplicate of the original site with a different domain name. That can cause problems with indexing your site in search engines.