Supreme Court says generic domains like booking.com can be trademarked

guest · Jun 30, 2020

Supreme Court says generic domains like booking.com can be trademarked
No one can trademark "Wine Inc.," but now domains like wine.com can get trademarks
June 30, 2020
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-domains-like-booking-com-can-be-trademarked/

The US Patent and Trademark Office erred by finding the term booking.com was too generic for trademark protection, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

Trademark law prohibits anyone from registering generic terms that describe a class of products or services. Anyone can start a store company called "The Wine Company," but they can't use trademark law to stop others from using the same name.
When the online travel giant Bookings Holdings sought to trademark its booking.com domain name almost a decade ago, the US Patent and Trademark Office concluded that the same rule applied.

Booking Holdings challenged this decision in court.
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Hence, Breyer warned, allowing the registration of generic domains like booking.com could enable companies to effectively monopolize the use of the generic term in conjunction with a dot-com domain name. In this sense, it raises the same issues as allowing trademarks for company names like "The Booking Company" or "Bookings Inc." That is, it could allow one company to monopolize a term that describes an entire industry, not just one company.
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guest · Jun 30, 2020

'Not a generic name': Booking.com wins trademark fight at U.S. Supreme Court
June 30, 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...mark-fight-at-u-s-supreme-court-idUSKBN2412EG

The travel reservation company Booking.com, a unit of Booking Holdings Inc, deserves to be able to trademark its name, the U.S. Supreme Court decided on Tuesday, overruling a federal agency that found it too generic to merit protection.

The court said surveys made clear that consumers understand that Booking.com refers to a particular company, and not online hotel reservation services in general.

“Because ‘Booking.com’ is not a generic name to consumers, it is not generic,” liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the ruling.
Booking.com, based in Amsterdam, welcomed the ruling, with spokeswoman Kimberly Soward saying in a statement that it “demonstrates that the U.S. legal system has the capacity to evolve in order to reflect the digital world we are all living in.”
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David Bernstein, a lawyer for Booking.com, called the decision “a victory for countless brand owners that have invested significant resources in building their brands - such as Weather.com, Law.com, Wine.com and Hotels.com.”
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