i wanna buy domain like hostgatorsucks or godaddyisbad .. Are they trade mark or what happens if i own them ? i will use the domains for anti-host campaigns..
If a hosting company owns has registered a trademark on their domain name, then you would be guilty of what is called "trademark dilution" which is a civil offense in the US and you could be sued for damages including punitive. Ultimately though, whether it is a trademark or not, anybody can sue anybody for civil infractions. It is a question of whether or not you can afford to fight them. ie. if you register verizonsucks.com, and verizon chooses to sue you for something (and they can find something with the large legal power they will have behind them). It will cost you time and mostly money because you will not want to answer a lawsuit without the help of a lawyer. Even if you take the name, it will probably cost anywhere from $500 upwards just to have to deal with it. Probably not worth it in my book, unless you have deep pockets. Hope this advice helps.
Yawn, just search around and you'll find numerous posts on that site. PayPal apparently doesn't see it fit to hold them liable for now, even though they've got a few grounds to work on. To the OP: gripe and parody sites are generally fine if they don't show any hints of commercial use, especially ads or redirects to sites that can show competing products or services of the mark in question.
Dave's absolutely right. Although the hosts' names are most surely trademarked and using them for ANY commercial use would be infringing their trademark, non-commercial parody or satire sites are permitted. So, if you just want to use it to set up a critique site to complain about their service, then you're good to go. If you want to use it to drive traffic so you can get click throughs or sell a product or link to a site that sells products or even have adsense ads on, you're going to have a problem... Though you haven't said what you'd be doing with the sites exactly, I would be very careful about making them discussion boards or blog sites where outside people can comment. Where you have the right to edit the content that other people post, you have the obligation to make sure that your site is not violating trademark law, even if you're not the person doing it. For example, you start a discussion board to talk about how much godaddy sucks. You're the moderator on the board and people start posting comments like, "GoDaddy sucks. Come use my registrar service GoodDaddy(I made it up, I don't know if it exists)", you've got to get rid of them... That's why I would suggest a site where you vent your wrath if it makes you feel better. Make sense? Let me know if you have other questions. Deena Burgess, Esq. __________________________________________________________________ Any opinions are offered without knowledge of the specific law of your jurisdiction and with only the limited information provided in your post. No advice given here should be reasonably relied upon by you or any third party without consulting an attorney who is aware of all of the facts and law surrounding your situation. Any advice given here is not intended to create an attorney-client relationship in any way.