What happens if there is a conflict between an Internet domain name and an existing trademark?
To establish a website, the owner must first register the site name with a domain name registry, such as http://networksolutions.net. As a general rule, you can register any name that isn’t already registered, without regard to whether the name is in fact a trademark owned by a different company. This has led to a number of instances where companies with famous marks have initially not been able to use these marks when establishing websites because someone already used the name to identify another site. Courts have generally sided with the trademark owners in these disputes and ordered the domain name user to stop using the offending name, even when no goods or services were being offered on the website. See also… Q & A: Copyright, Trademark, Patent Q & A: Intellectual Property & Internet Law International Law Issues ….
Even if a company owns a federally registered trademark, someone else may still have the right to the domain name. For example, many different companies have federally registered the trademark Executive for different goods or services. All of these companies may want www.executive.com but the first one to purchase it—in this case, Executive Software—is the one that acquired the domain name and has the rights to it. Sometimes a person (known as a “cybersquatter”) registers a trademark as a domain name hoping to later profit by reselling the domain name back to the trademark owner. If you believe that someone has taken a domain in bad faith, you can either sue under the provisions of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), or you can fight the cybersquatter using an international arbitration system created by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The ACPA defines cybersquatting as registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with the intent
