l still don’t understand my options if any.
Well, there's a reason I don't write plays. I'm sure they would suck. "Hey guys, does anyone have a good list of insults in iambic pentameter that I can use for a swordfight thing I'm working on?"
Among the duties owed by a lawyer to an actual client - i.e. someone whom the lawyer undertakes to advise - are the duties to maintain confidentiality of such communications and to maintain the privilege in those communications against use as evidence. That is, of course, not possible on an internet forum which is why no competent lawyer would engage in providing legal advice on one. It is instant malpractice.
If I were Catholic, I'm sure there is probably an online religious forum I might find in which I could converse with a priest or two, but I wouldn't expect to go to confession there.
Questions in this forum do provide handy jumping off points to address various common misconceptions. My purpose here was simply to point out that a frequent problem among domainers is an undue fixation on specialized tools they don't know how to use.
"My professor said I right bad, but spell check fund no airs in what I rote."
A trademark is not a government grant of some kind. In the US, Commonwealth countries, and some other places, a trademark includes any symbol or word which is perceived by the relevant consuming public to distinctively indicate the source or origin of the goods or services with which the mark is used. When you see a bottle of ale with a red triangle on it, you know it is Bass Ale, as did the frequently-illiterate warehousemen on the canals and rivers of England when a crate had that red triangle on it - a trade mark - to identify which goods were whose. That red triangle is one of the oldest continuously used trademarks. Does it confer an outright monopoly on red triangles? No.
Is "beer" a trademark for beer? No. Is "Bud" a trademark for beer? Yes. Is "Bud" a trademark for flowers, no. Why? Because while "Bud" is distinctive in relation to beverages, it is generic in relation to flowering plants. You aren't going to see "Bud" brand cannabis anytime soon, because they've been called "buds" for years.
Honestly, it's like a whole field of study... Imagine someone walking up to you and saying, "I've got about a minute before I can catch a bus, could you summarize the Transcendentalists for me?"
If you have a trademark in the US, then you might want to take the additional step of attempting to register that trademark. But, what domainers are doing when they consult TESS is like looking at a list of all of the dog licenses, in order to find all of the people who own dogs. It won't work. There are a lot more people who own dogs, and there are a lot more dogs, than there are dog licenses. Some people don't license their dogs. They still own dogs, and their dogs will still bite you if you try to break into their house.
But, one of the advantages of registration in the US is that it confers what is called "constructive notice" which eliminates the defense of "I never heard of the mark" if you are infringing it.
I’m guessing perhaps l should try to sell the domain name to the app owner—though it’s hard for me to imagine that he or she hasn’t already determined if QpidDating.com is available.
They have a company to run, and there are an infinite number of domain names that might incorporate variations of their trading area and mark. QpidDates.com, QpidDate.com, DatingQpid.com, and so on, and in hundreds of TLD's. There's just no point in spending thousands of dollars to accumulate thousands of variant domain names for no productive purpose. In their company, as in most companies, they prefer to pay their employees to spend all day making money instead of finding ways to spend it.
In the event someone registers a confusingly similar domain name and attracts their attention, they have various legal mechanisms at their disposal to deal with that. These mechanisms include, for example, seeking $100,000 in statutory damages if it appears more likely than not that someone registered the domain name for the purpose of selling it to them, which is exactly what you'd look like if you showed up on their doorstep looking to sell this domain name to them.
I came out of a bar one night and met a helpful young man in the parking lot who pointed out that some awful persons had apparently stolen the hubcaps from my car but, as fate would have it, this young man happened to have an identical set for sale right there! Thank goodness he showed up, or I would not have had the opportunity to purchase an immediate set of replacements!
