Legal Question in Business Law in New York

Re: Trademark

It's a good question. While the law is not completely fleshed out on issues of intellectualt property and copyright, generally speaking while your copyrighted name may protect you against poachers it will not protect you against bonafied users of the name. Lets say you're the abc company and you have www.abc.net if there is an abc manufacturing corp that is another jurisdiction and does not make the same product as you and they have www.abc.com the fact that you have a copyright will not allow you to maintain an infringement claim against that company.

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Re: Trademark

Just to clarify, you do not "trademark" company names or websites, these are reservation procedures that do not result in trademark registrations and serve very different purposes. Nothing gives you as broad a right as a trademark, although trademarks are not unlimited or absolute in terms of excluding others either.

You need to keep the notions of a company/trade name, trademark for products/services and website address registration separate. The procedures for obtaining these are different too and give you different rights (if you succeed in registering the name you want). Although, as a general matter, having a registered trademark for a particular brand (which may also happen to be the corporate name, which is registrable only within a given state of incorporation) is very helpful in trademark litigation, trademarks are territorial in nature as well. You could have a federal trademark that would cover you throughout the U.S. but would need separate registrations in foreign countries. Website name registrations may be obtained (and challenged) on a more "global" basis due to the nature of Internet. There is a special arbitration procedure for contesting someone else's website address if you are the trademark owner for the name used in the address.

Before you do anything, though, the first step to take is to do several searches to see if the name/s you want are available and do/es not cause a conflict with the existing ones. At a minimum, the searches should cover the Secretary of State corporate name records, Internet domain names, and federal, state and common law trademarks.

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