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December 12, 2008

A Trademark For Your Domain

After working hard to create a website and introduce your products, you then set out to bring in a steady flow of visitors.  As you're your traffic increases, the more your website grows, increasing the value of your domain.  After establishing a worthy online presence, you may want to consider trademarking your domain.  This is a great way to protect your brand from an array of unscrupulous competitors with thoughts of implementing your domain into meta tags, enabling them to boost their search engine rankings at your expense.  With your domain trademarked, you can take action against these characters and possibly have the search engines remove their deceptive listings.

The Relationship Between Trademarks and Domains

In simple terms, a trademark is a distinctive form of branding used to identify a product, service, logo, device or package, specifying that it belongs to a particular entity.  These items can be protected by obtaining a mark from the patent and trademark office, prohibiting others from taking financial advantage of your creation.

When it comes to domain names, the trademark and patent office has a totally different outlook.  From their perspective, the "http://www"is an element of the file transfer process rather than your domain name.  An extension such as ".com" or ."net" is viewed as a TLD (top-level domain) identifier and ignored in regard to the domain trademark.  For example, lets say your domain is http://www.mytrademark.com When submitting it for registration, you would provide "mytrademark", which is the only portion that would get considered for the trademark.

No Locators

A domain is a locator that finds web pages.  When typing a URL into the browser, a server locates and displays the files on that page.  A domain name used strictly for this purpose cannot be trademarked.  Instead, the name must be incorporated into the website.  An example would be the electronics outlet Circuit City that has their own website.  You will notice that every page name contains "Circuit City" in it.  In this scenario, circuitcity.com is more than a locator, meaning "circuit city" is worthy of a trademark.

Generic and Descriptive Variations

A domain name that is generic or descriptive in nature can't be registered for a trademark.  This is because it fails to specify a particular product or service.  For instance, "michiganbikeshop" is made up of generic terms, giving incite on who and where the domain owner is, but not exactly specifying it.  A domain comprised in this nature cannot be trademark. So how about coke.com, the website for the soft drink manufacturer Coca-Cola?  How would these rules apply to a name that is essentially a generic term for cola?  This website is trademarked because "Coke" is a term that describes a specific soft drink product.  It's just a coincidence that several people refer to other brands of soda as coke, the results of a brilliant marketing scheme.

Conclusion

You started from nothing and built your website into a successful business - why not protect it?  By trademarking your domain name, you can keep the competition from leaching off your efforts while adding more credibility to your name. These benefits are well worth the investment.

Tags: search engine rankings,  meta tags,  domain value,  domain,  branding,  trademark