Granting a linguistic monopoly
read more (QZ)
Take Booking.com, for example, which ranked 216 on the Fortune 500 last year. EFF points out that it might seek to exclude competitors from using booking.biz, booking.co, booking.inc, or booking.company as domain names.
It already claimed the .booking domain and could threaten competitors using second-level domains that include the generic term or a close variant, like ebooking. com, or bookings.com, or even booker.com.
Add to that trademark law’s “doctrine of foreign equivalents,” which extends protection beyond the English language, and Booking.com’s ”linguistic monopoly”—as EFF puts it—could stretch to the word “booking” in other tongues, too.
Domain names matter. They’re valuable in and of themselves, even putting trademark protections aside.
read more (QZ)
