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Trademarking A Name In The Internet Age

A number of years ago the well known actor Morgan Freeman found out that the company Mighty LLC was illegally using the domain name www.forganfreeman.com “in bad faith to divert Internet traffic to a commercial search engine.” Freeman applied to the USPTO for a trademark.

His claim went to arbitration. Ultimately, in 2005, the arbitrators for the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) – the intellectual property component of the United Nations – agreed with the actor and determined that as a result of his illustrious career his name was sufficiently recognizable in the sphere of movies and entertainment. So he was able to trademark his name.

As the electronic and Internet age evolves, a lot of famous people are now using trademark law to protect their names on the World Wide Web.

One of the purposes of trademark law is to prevent any confusion between certain services or goods. It does this by indicating the source of the trademark. This law is being used by celebrities to recover domain names that contain their trademarks.

Trademark infringement is a serious crime. Names of companies, their business logos, their symbols, and even particular sounds can be trademarked as well as people’s names. Anything from the NBC chimes to the Nike “swoosh” to Julia Roberts’ name are all registered with the USPTO.

Because it is so easy to register a domain name – it only takes a few minutes and often less than ten dollars – some “cybersquatters” tried to register domain names that are either similar to or actually identically to a number of well known trademarks. They then attempted to sell the domain name that they bought for a lot of money to the owner of the mark.

It had been done to PETA, Julia Roberts, Paine Webber, and Bruce Springsteen. Some people might call the cybersquatters’ efforts either blackmail or extortion.

In any case, it didn’t sit well with the government. So, in November 1999 the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act was signed into law by President Clinton after being passed by Congress.

Under this law if anyone registers a domain name that’s similar or identical to a famous or distinctive trademark because they have a bad faith intent to make a profit, the owner of the trademark can sue to recover the domain name and to collect damages.

ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was also established around that time. Its purpose is to authorize a supervisor of domain name registrations and to establish an online arbitration system that could be used to resolve any domain name disputes that arise.

Nonetheless, because it is still so easy for anyone to register a domain name, if you feel that your name could be threatened at any time by a cybersquatter you may want to further investigate trademarking a name.

About the Author

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