{"id":34362,"date":"2008-03-26T16:35:41","date_gmt":"2008-03-26T21:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.findlaw-admin.com\/ability-legal\/uncategorized\/what-s-in-a-name.html"},"modified":"2008-03-26T16:35:41","modified_gmt":"2008-03-26T21:35:41","slug":"what-s-in-a-name","status":"publish","type":"corporate","link":"https:\/\/corporate.findlaw.com\/intellectual-property\/what-s-in-a-name.html","title":{"rendered":"What’s In A Name?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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… that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. [1]<\/a> Well, maybe. But in the business world, a company and its products may not be as .sweet. to a consumer unless the name(s) are well-known to the consumers. Businesses must protect the value of their company and product names and prevent others from trading off of them.

In the Age of the Internet, it is both easier for an unscrupulous person to trade on your name and for you to catch him or her doing it. Such persons register Internet domain names, company names, and trademarks or domain names to mislead others looking for such names and trademarks and to divert consumers to websites from which the unscrupulous persons derive advertising income. You can fairly easily discover such domain name registrations and uses. With a bit more effort and expense you can stop them.<\/p>

To discover if someone has registered the names of your company and trademarks as Internet domain names, simply run a search on the Internet for them. You should also go to the websites for the authorized domain name registrars (there are several) and run searches there. For example, if you go to the website for one of the most widely used registrars, Network Solutions, Inc., and click on its WHOIS database, you can search for the names in which you are interested and learn the identity of anyone who has registered them as domain names.<\/p>

If you discover that someone has registered your name, company name, or trademark as a domain name and you want to use such name(s), you may be able to force the domain name owner to transfer the domain name to you. The process requires filing a written complaint (which meets specific legal standards) under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) with one of several approved on-line companies. Filing fees will be between $1,500 and a few thousand dollars. If your complaint is properly supported, the UDRP arbiter will order the domain name transferred to you.<\/p>

Trademark owners can also sue for monetary damages under the federal Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), even if actual damages are limited or difficult to show. To prevail, the trademark owner must prove that the domain name is the same or confusingly similar and that domain name holder had a bad faith intent to profit from the trademark. Under the ACPA, the court can award statutory damages of between $1,000 and $100,000 per misused domain name. In a recent case, a federal court in Philadelphia awarded $500,000 in damages against a man who registered five domain names ($100,000 per domain name) that were slight misspellings of trademarks owned by one company. Of course, the cost and time to resolve a federal lawsuit is much greater than in an UDRP proceeding.<\/p>

In conclusion, I return to Shakespeare:<\/p>

Who steals my purse steals trash . . . But he that filches from me any good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed. [2]<\/a><\/p>