domains EFF: Booking.com Trademark Would Harm Competition

[Lox]

Siding against Booking.com, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging the Supreme Court to rule that the online reservation company is not entitled to trademark its name.

The organization argues in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Monday that companies aren't entitled to trademark generic words like “booking” by combining them with generic top-level domains like “.com.”

The watchdog adds that allowing terms like “booking.com” to be trademarked “contravenes the purposes of trademark law to the detriment of consumer rights and competition.”

The EFF is weighing in on a battle between the Patent and Trademark Office and Booking.com dating to 2016, when the web company sued over the agency's refusal to issue a trademark on the grounds that Booking.com was too generic.

read more (mediapost)

 

[RJ]

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in February, writing that the agency had not proven that consumers view the term “booking.com” as referring in general to online hotel reservation services.

What a terrible decision, and bad for generic domain owners. They said that "Booking.com" is too generic for trademark protection, when the opposite is actually true. "Booking.com" is very highly specific! There's only one company in the world that can rightfully claim to be "Booking.com" and that is whoever is running a business on the booking.com domain name.

If this stands, generic domains become less valuable to startup companies. If you can't brand themselves with domains like Hotels.com, Pets.com, or with other generic words, then becomes better to build using brandable names that qualify as trademarkable brands like Trivago.com, Chewy.com, etc.