A Quick Question About Review Sites And Trademarks

[Hesaidblissfully]

I asked this question in the thread someone had recently where they were contacted by Amazon after using "Amazon" and "Kindle" in their domain name, but no one had answered the question as of this writing, and I was curious. Here's the question.

"...what about all those review sites that use the product name in the domain name? Like "googlesniperreview" and such. Do the product owners just allow it because the review sites are recommending their products and making them money?"

I don't have any review sites that use product names in the domain name, nor do I plan to, but was still curious as to whether using product names in a review site comes up as an issue, or if the product owners typically don't mind as long as you're making them money. I mean, I know that if it's their trademarked name, they COULD request that you stop using it or pursue legal action, but is it usually something that's overlooked in light of profits?

Your thoughts/experiences are appreciated.

[JohnMcCabe]

The short, and eminently unhelpful, answer is "it depends."

[Insert standard CYA - IANAL, etc.]

From my reading, a trademark has to be registered to be enforceable. No registration, no protection. My guess is that many of the product names you're referring to were never registered as trademarks.

Once registered, the trademark has to be defended. Amazon defending its trademark is what generated the letter that sparked the other thread.

Don't confuse 'trademark' with 'copyright' - the two are different concepts. While the creator of, say, Google Sniper, holds the copyright on the product itself, there is no copyright on the title.

To get protection for the title, the owner would have to legally register a trademark.

That's why it's perfectly legal to use the phrase 'Amazon Kindle' in an article, a review or a video but not in a domain name. To be perfectly compliant, you would have to acknowledge Amazon's trademark by including the (tm) notation or the superscript symbol every time you mentioned the name. That gets cumbersome sometimes, so you can usually get by with a disclaimer like "Amazon Kindle is a registered trademark of Amazon.com."

[sbucciarel]

GoogleSniper.com was registered in Feb this year and any review sites with that name in it, after that. It's quite possible Google simply hasn't caught up with them yet.

There are some trademark holders who don't pursue it and risk losing their trademarks, and some who do pursue it and defend their trademarks. Google defends their trademark, as does Ebay, Amazon.com and many others.

It simply isn't worth the effort of building a site, getting traffic and content only to have it taken away just when it becomes profitable.

The owner of Google Sniper isn't the one you need to worry about. They won't care at all if you use their name. I seriously doubt that they have even trademarked it. Most of these product launches have not trademarked the names, particularly if they use a trademarked name in their name, such as Google Sniper. Google is the one that will come after you ... and don't even try to use Adwords with it.