I don't want any trouble with registering a copyright protected name as a domain, so how do I find out if a name is protected? There is site for the US ( http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=film6j.1.1 ) but where do I find a site for europe?
The federal site will not by itself cover you for the US. Trademarks can also be registered with states, and can also arise from use. I may be wrong, but I think that someone can have a trademark that can block yours even if it has never been registered anywhere. In Europe, I believe trademark is still country by country. I could be wrong on that. Laws also vary within Europe about how to get a trademark and what the standards are. Law firms generally use a company called Thomson and Thomson to run a search. It costs a few hundred dollars for the US, but it is the only way I know of to get any reasonable comfort on whether the name is in use anywhere.
So the only way to know if I'm doing something illegal by purchasing a domainname I have to spend hundreds of dollars. There must be another way, at least I hope so...
The law says, the first to use a name, for that particular use, is the owner of that name. Obtaining a Federal Registration is way of telling everyone you own the name, sets the date of first usage in stone, and gives you the ability to collect treble damages in an infringement suit - but a Trademark doesn't give you any more rights to the name. There is no national registry to look through that is going to show all prior usuages. Even if you pay a couple of hundred for a prior usuage search, it is no guarantee that the name hasn't been used and that you won't have any problems. The search sometimes misses a mom & pop operation using the name. I would first check the USPTO for any registrations, then I would search the net for any prior usuage. Then I would pay a search firm. Trademarks and Servicemarks are granted by some 40 different classifications. If you register "blue widgets" as a perfume, it doesn't give you rights to the name for an electronics device. The larger companies have broad protection- there register their name in many or all the classification which basically gives them the rights to the name for any use. Trademark and Servicemark protection extends to misspellings, phonetic spellings, and even foreign spellings, so there is no easy way to do a search yourself. That is why paying a search company has benefits. Microsoft is protected, but so is MikeRoweSoft. You also can't add to a protected term... i.e. Microsoft Repair Forums, etc... as the term to use any form "microsoft" is protected. There isn't any easy way to do a search. Using the USPTO and various search engines will probably catch 95% of prior usuage, but it will miss the other 5%. If you were going to spend a lot of time or money into developing a name, a few hundred dollars is cheap protection - or you can risk it by doing your own search knowing your chance of losing the domain is increased.
Not really. My wife and I were founding, passive investors in a restaurant chain now called Qdoba. Even using lawyers and paying lots of moneys on fees, Qdoba was the third name they used before they got one free of trademark issues. It's a tricky thing. As with all legal business issues, you can decide to give up on achieving total legal security and just take the risk. No one is going to tell you to do that, because no one wants you coming around later claiming that you advised them to engage in risky behavior. The point of a Thomson & Thomson is not to eliminate risk, but to reduce it to a point where you feel reasonably secure that you have identified most of the risks. You can get to something less reliable than a Thomson & Thomson with some diligent Google searching and checking the public registries, but even then you will have at least two risks: 1) that you missed something (still a risk, but a lesser risk, with a Thomson & Thomson), and 2) that because you are not a trademark expert, there was something that you found or could have found the significance of which you failed to appreciate. If you expect to invest a lot of money and time in building a business, it is a reasonable investment to hire a trademark lawyer on the front end. It's pretty expensive to rebrand, especially where rebranding means abandoning a URL that is the doorway to your business.
This is excellent advice. One of the largest specialty clothing retailers in the US found themselves days from launching a new concept store only to discover that a small little obsure store was already using the name. A friend of mine who owned the store was approached by a law firm wanting to purchase the rights to the name. Since this was a huge firm, he correctly figured out something was up and wound up getting a fairly good sum of money that was worth much more than his wife's tiny little store. He changed the name and pocketed the money. The trademark search firm hired by the national retailer had missed the prior usage and the CEO of the clothing chain happened to run into the store when he was on vacation in the Napa Valley. While no search for prior usage is 100%, it will eliminate the majority of problems. In the end, the national retailer who purchased the name opened six concept stores under the name and wound up abandoning the name when the stores didn't perform to expectations.
copyright and trademarks are different. The creator of a work is automatically the copyright owner. As for trademarks, a name with a (TM) in it is an unregistered trademark. Whereas, an (R) with a circle around it is a registered trademark.
That's bad advice. While such a search is bound to catch many usages, it isn't nearly complete. Even a search that runs hundreds of dollars will miss prior usages - and they check State and Federal records, credit reports, etc. A small business run out of a house, with no listed business phone number, and which does marketing by mail wouldn't be on the web - yet they can claim prior usage to a name.
I don't know which part of europe the name you intended applies to but this site can give you a good start. http://www.bmb-bbm.org/merken/en/index.php From here you can contact them to ask them if they can provide you more trademark registries or you google for this term and hopefully you will find the registries you need to determine if the name is not registered in Europe. Hope this helped
most registrars protect names for you... you can have your whois info blocked for couple extrabucks a month
What you are referring to are whois records. What is being discussed in this thread are trademark registries. That is a total different subject