Domain Names and Protecting Your Brand | Arizona
Hi, I’m Maria Speth. I’m an attorney with the law firm of Jaburg and Wilk. I practice in the areas of intellectual property and internet law.
What is a domain name?
Well, domain name is actually your address on the internet. We think of it as the .com, and it is not necessarily the same as a company name, but it might be. In a perfect world you’d like your company name to also be your domain name. So, if your company name is Acme it would be really nice to have acme.com, but that doesn’t always work out that way.
What changes are coming to domain names?
Traditionally and currently what we have is we have a limited number of domain names – the ones we’re used to – .com, .org, .info, .biz. In 2013 as they start rolling out these domain names we’re going to see all kinds of new domain names such as .movie, .restaurant. I like to call it .anything.
What can I do to protect my brand?
The list is available at ican.org and it’s also available on our website at jaburgwilk.com. So you’ll look at that list and you’ll look at two things. One is are there any generic top level domain names on that list that interfere with or conflict with your brand name because if there is you’re going to want to object to those. The second thing that you want to do when you go to the list is you’ll want to see what fields, areas of use there are that are interesting to you, like if you’re a movie theatre and you see .movie well I want some domain names to go with .movie. If you’re a restaurant you might want your brand name .restaurant. Those are the two things you should do is take a look at the list, see what’s out there and what might impact your brand.