Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Trademark And The Internet

By Alex Finn

In this era of widespread internet usage, trademark laws acquire special significance in cyberspace, particularly in terms of trademarks for domain names. This is quite important because of the fact that your domain name conveys your identity as well as signifies your services to the consumers.

The moment you are a trademark holder of a domain name, you can bring charges of infringement upon a company for using a similar name and thereby confusing the public into believing that you, the genuine trademark owner, are in some way connected to their web site.

However, you have to do a comprehensive search for identical domain names in existence before registering your trademark, in order to avoid any violations. Your research must ensure the fact that your trademark is unique and does not resemble others in sound, meaning or spelling. It is very important to register a domain only after properly checking that it does not violate any trademarks.

For attaining this, it is preferable to hire the services of a cyber law practitioner, who can guide you in cyber related trademark issues. This will protect you from serious trademark violation action that can arise in future.

You should be mindful of the fact that the domain name that you want to trademark should be more than a mere web address to bring users to your site. It must be an identity that distinguishes your services from others.

In addition to infringement of domain names, keyword infringement has emerged as a new problem in virtual domains, which means violation of real trademarks by their usage as keywords in ads on Google, Yahoo etc with an objective to confuse the customers or to dilute the genuine trademark.

If the promotional ads help in increasing the sale of the trademark owner, it is not a violation but the problem is created when the infringer starts using such ads for marketing his own goods for an economic advantage.

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