(Newswire.net — May 6, 2020) — Booking.com is trying to protect the trademark on its name in front of the Supreme Court in the U.S. The problem is, generic terms are not eligible for trademarks.
Law in the Days of the Coronavirus
The COVID-19 pandemic will have changed the way we did things for a period of time and some of the new practices will probably stay long term. That was quite evident at the Booking.com hearing which was held by telephone and audio cast in real time on C-SPAN, is a first in the history of law and the Supreme Court.
While Booking.com’s lawyer Lisa Blatt was trying to convince the court that the name is specific to her client’s company in consumers’ minds, the judges were expressing concerns that by adding a .com at the end of a generic term, companies could then create a monopoly around it.
The power of a website name on the internet is well known. That is why so many individuals and companies want to get their hands on expired domains. The notoriety that has previously been built by the original owner is free advertising money for the new developer, and the existing backlinks also add to the positioning of the site in search result pages on Google and other search engines.
Can the Internet Change the Rules of Trademarks?
The judges agreed that, before the age of the World Wide Web, it would have been impossible for a company to do such a thing as trademark a generic term like “booking”. But since on the internet you can create any website name you desire, the company was able to buy booking.com which is now a company’s name known all over the world. They feel like they are being asked to provide the company with an even stronger monopoly by providing it with trademark protection and they said so to Lisa Blatt.
Justices also raised other problems the law would be facing if they concluded that in the public eye a generic name referring directly to a company would be enough to entitle its owners to trademark it. That would most certainly mean that any company named after a generic term could ask for the same treatment as booking.com, and be granted trademark protection for a generic term. If that were to happen, the system would be flooded with expensive legal fights.
It also raises the question on how the U.S. Patent and Trade Office could come to the conclusion that one company’s notoriety is strong enough to justify providing them with a trademark on a generic term. Will they have to consult the population through a survey every time a similar situation would come up?
Booking.com’s lawyer responded to that by reminding the court that the Patent and Trademark Office had already granted other generic terms to be used as company names, utilizing weather.com as an example. She said that the Office looked at how weather.com was perceived and came to the conclusion that its main significance in the eyes of the public was that it existed as a brand, granting weather.com its trademark.