Naming my website

Hello,

I have a quick question, I would like to start a website with hotels reservations..etc, I would like to name it booking(the-name-of-the-country), would this be a problem, given the fact that there is booking.com, as I read on the internet, booking is a word in English and it couldn't be registered, but I thought I'd asked.

Thanks.

 

It's related to tourism, the idea is similar...a list of all available accommodation just that it will be targeted to a specific country or region.

 

I wouldn't worry about it. Some people have argued that nobody can ever use a word like "coupon" in a website because coupons.com has a trademark but plenty are using that word.

 

Yeah that's true, but isn't a way to find out if they have registered "booking" as a trademark?

 

I've search and found this: https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#basic/1+1+1+1/50+50+50+50/booking as I can see there are more than one registered companies with booking, so I may use it or not?

 

Here's the deal: you can do anything that you want to do and are willing to pay to defend in court. @sarahk is correctly steering you to seek professional legal advice because you are treading into potentially dangerous territory, in this regard. Here's how it works: you can ignore this advice and move forward with your potentially infringing url. You will go unnoticed for quite some time as you work hard to build up traffic and sales. As the months (and possibly years) progress, you will begin to build up a following, have a lot of customers and the business will begin to look very promising. That is exactly when you will show up on the booking.com radar screen and they will devote serious legal efforts to shut you down, get a lien on your total revenues, etc. In these cases, typically the company with the deepest pockets win because they can drag out the legal process until the other side folds.

I have never understood businesspeople that want to start a questionable business, put in all that effort, etc., only to take a very real chance that it will all be taken away from them when they are finally starting to reap the rewards. Yet, I have seen it happen time and again.

 

Can you provide some examples where people using generic words like "booking" (or coupons) in a website lost their URL? That's like saying nobody can ever use the word "auto" in a URL because somebody else has a trademark on it. So no "auto parts", which is absurd.

 

I started to look up some cases (not that I am a lawyer, by the way) and stumbled across this which actually seems to answer the OP's original question. Armed with this information, I would be much more comfortable moving forward with the OP's url:

http://thetmca.com/no-room-at-the-uspto-ttab-rejects-booking-com-trademarks-as-generic/

So, in this specific case, the USPTO has just ruled that booking.com is generic. This is why I recommended the OP to seek legal advice. Though a quick search on Google would have been a good first step.

 

From your link:

And that's the proper decision. It infuriates me when deep-pocketed businesses think they should be able to prevent anyone else from using generic words like booking.com tried to do. And that should never be allowed.

Google is an original word so it makes sense there is an exclusive trademark granted on it. But for words like booking, coupons, and so forth, nobody and no business should have the right to prevent people from using those generic words.

 

try to register with generic keyword and your own word.

 

That's what I want, so it will be booking(country-name).tld

But, I thought that I may have some problems, I could name it something like directbookingcountry.tld - but I find it too long, but of course it also has the word booking in it.

 

Most of the people visiting your website will be clicking on a link or coming from a bookmark and will not be typing your domain name in its entirety.

 

Perhaps, but nobody can run their business nor their life that way. In the end, you have to hope common sense wins out.

 

Source: http://www.dmlp.org/book/export/html/955