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domains Good luck finding a name for your new company

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equity78

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The number of trademarks has been climbing steadily over the past decade, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. That is making it harder and harder for businesses to find a name that hasn’t been taken by another company.

So companies are having to get creative. Some companies are getting around the shortage of names by using creative spellings. Think “Lyft.” And company names have to be versatile, so they work as a website domain and on social media.

Click the audio player above to hear the full story.

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/05/25/company-names-trademarks-intellecutal-property/
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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Very interesting read, I appreciate the info NickB.
I’m just getting started in domaining and the topic title seemed a bit click baity.
 
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Very interesting read, I appreciate the info NickB.
I’m just getting started in domaining and the topic title seemed a bit click baity.
It wasn't a click bait title, he just posted what marketplace.org put on their site - it was an interesting listen

My post was meant to be an attempt at tongue in cheek humour :xf.smile: (might have failed on that)
 
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Totally my bad, I’ll admit I didn’t click the link yet to listen. Internet humor is funny sometimes lol
 
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At some point either trademarks will be devaluedor ignored as mpre people have a right to own a website and this a website addresses irrespective of trademarks

Or

Trademarks will overide a persons right to own a website and thus a websote address which means not everyone will be able to have a website address which means the very existance of trademarks will be challenged as more ppeople will have to build their brands on facebook and google owned websites but either way the value of domain names wil soar

A persom or business will have to pay whatever the owner of the domain decides to charge

But businesses will have a choice

Pay on excess of 6 figures+ for a quality domain name to build their brand on their own platform

Or

Have no choice but to build their brand on facebook or google owned websites for free on facebooks and googles terms not their own

But this caises yet another problem traditional mondset will have to get used to

Eg

Businesses will start having to mortgage their homes and business premises and even the actual business itself just to be able to afford to buy the domain name and even then domain name owners will still say there isnt enough equity in what the business offers to be able to afford the domain name

All good fun lol
 
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So there are 45 trademark classes (34 for goods & 11 for services)

There are around 750,000 English words in existence: https://www.lexico.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language

45 x 750,000 = 33,750,000 possible trademarks available just for English words

Then you can add all the Brandables etc etc to the above......

No need to panic just yet


There are probably only 5000 words, 10000 with a big stretch, that everyone cares about. So every new business tries them, and every big fish is trying to TM those. And then when they do TM they try to cover a wider net with segments as well, let's say average of 3. So, now you are looking at 10K x (45/3), just 150 000 large companies that take control of specific uses of major words.

Hence the rise of word+suffix, word+word etc. names, because then you can create much larger pool of the names and you can have much clearer title to your name.

If your detergent is Tide, your rights are pretty much limited to cleaning products and services. If your detergent is called Bonux, then you get much wider net, covering your rights, even if you haven't filed for TM in that geography and another product is not clearly infringing, although a created name might be so obvious and good, that few companies could reasonably have arrived at the choice without any bad intention. In this case, it would be discussion around how well known you are. So, if you are facebook, even if it is a great choice that many companies could have come up with, they'd have very weak case in pretty much any area, even a book called "face" ))
 
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It's getting harder to think of a good name of new start company.
 
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No need to panic just yet
If you dont write panic articles or do panic podcasts etc how do you expect to get a hit?

Everything has turned into panic and drama thanks to desperate online publishers.
 
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There are probably only 5000 words, 10000 with a big stretch, that everyone cares about. So every new business tries them, and every big fish is trying to TM those. And then when they do TM they try to cover a wider net with segments as well, let's say average of 3. So, now you are looking at 10K x (45/3), just 150 000 large companies that take control of specific uses of major words.

Hence the rise of word+suffix, word+word etc. names, because then you can create much larger pool of the names and you can have much clearer title to your name.

If your detergent is Tide, your rights are pretty much limited to cleaning products and services. If your detergent is called Bonux, then you get much wider net, covering your rights, even if you haven't filed for TM in that geography and another product is not clearly infringing, although a created name might be so obvious and good, that few companies could reasonably have arrived at the choice without any bad intention. In this case, it would be discussion around how well known you are. So, if you are facebook, even if it is a great choice that many companies could have come up with, they'd have very weak case in pretty much any area, even a book called "face" ))

Good points.
 
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