Hello! New to the site the business of websites and am looking for some experienced advice. Current situation: I have registered a domain that includes the name of a popular resort with the word honeymoons attached (XXXXXX-Honeymons.com) The purpose of the site is to give detailed information about this resort only and try to encourage newlyweds to go there for their honeymoon. The plan is to monetize through ads, sales of vacation packages (I am a travel agent), etc. I have contacted the resort to get approval and they responded with the following: How do you suggest I proceed? What are my options without ending up in court? How do I determine if the resort name is trademarked? I don't see how it could be. It is such a generic, common word. Obviously, I don't want to give them the URL and then build out the site like they are suggesting. "My apologies for the delay but I've just received this counsel from our legal advisors: I hope you are fine and regret the delay. In principle it is a violation of intellectual property rights, since it may cause confusion among consumers. According to his argument, he wishes to promote XXXX (resort name) mark, but at the end, he might change and diversify his products which does us harm. If you consider and feel comfortable with his promotion, we can license the mark to him, but he has to assign to our IT department the url and the images of our pages. Should you need further information, please let me know to discuss this topic by phone. Thus given his latter statement, and the confidence I have that you'll follow our guidelines and stay true to the XXXXX brand, we'll ask that you please assign the URL to our IT department and we'll point it to your servers. That removes you from liability. There does also need to be a disclaimer that clearly states you are not the resort, nor employed by or representatives of the resort, and we'll help you with some wording. It's not painful, I promise. We'll have someone on our team contact you early in the week to get the ball rolling. We have a website that hosts all the latest images and product guides for fleshing out the details. We'll have our marketing coordinator assist you as soon as possible." Thank you in advance for any advice you may have!
They want you to give them ownership of the domain and they will let you market the domain, as I understand it, only as it applies to their business. They aren't likely to let you run advertising for other resorts. You don't really have any options if you want to get business or run ads on the site (commercial usage). When the site is about their resort, it makes it a trademark infringement to do so without their permission. Trademarks don't need to be registered. Choose another domain without their resort name or do as they want. Those are your options. If you do it without their permission, they can sue you for all money the site has ever made, damages, and their legal fees.
Thank you for the input mjewel! I know these boards are filled with very knowledgeable people. Does anyone else have any input?