ABA Family Legal Guide

Forming and Operating a Small Business

Intellectual Property

Trademarks

I'm concerned about the legal side of choosing an Internet name or Internet slogan. Can I automatically use my trade name as a domain name?

You can use almost anything as an Internet name. Your name on the Internet will be your domain name--the unique address used by the Internet's infrastructure to allow other computers to find you on the Internet. Your domain name is a word or phrase ending in one of the now ubiquitous top-level domain extensions such as ".com" or ".org" or ".net". Your preferred domain name might be the name of your business followed by the popular .com extension--"yourbusiness.com"--or or you might use a phrase or slogan, such as "worldsgreatestwidgets.com." The ".com" top-level domain extension was originally intended to refer to a commercial enterprise, while ".org" refers to a not-for-profit enterprise and ".net" signifies that the domain name is held by an Internet-related organization.

Once you have selected a domain name you would like to use, you need to find out whether it is available. You might want to do a Web search before you select your trademark or trade name. Someone else may have registered the domain name even if they are not claiming trademark rights in the name or mark. If a company has already registered a domain name as its own, then you are too late. But even if a domain name is available, it may not be a wise choice. Other businesses may be using the same word or phrase, or an almost identical word or phrase, as a trademark or a trade name.

These businesses may choose not to register their trademarks as domain names. But they might still be very interested in protecting their trademarks. They may have the money to go to court to try to prevent you from using your chosen domain name on the grounds that it infringes their trademark. A trademark owner might obtain a court order preventing you from using your chosen domain name if the trademark owner shows either that consumers will be confused about who is behind your domain name or that your business will attract consumers unfairly because their trademark is well known and consumers will seek it out on the Internet. In some cases, a trademark owner can also initiate a domain name arbitration under the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy to prevent others from using domain names that are similar to their trademarks.