Any value in trademarked domain names?

I'd pass. There's a reason the price is tempting. Sounds like a game of Old Maid.

And your first thought was correct, I think.

They can be perfectly safe as long as they're unused, because they may come to the trademark owner's attention only when there's a site on them.

The prices tend to be attractive: many are available for reg-fee, because they have no realistic value to anyone other than the trademark owner.

There are plenty of threads here on this subject, some of them started off by Warriors who have made the mistake of using someone else's trademark in a domain-name in a context which can be held to be "competing" in some sense, and - one way or another - have paid dearly for doing so.

There are some gray areas, though. There are circumstances under which courts permit the use of other people's trademarks in domain-names. I think they exclude anything with commercial/financial intent in the same context as that of the trademark owner, though.

But for the most part, these are for people with very strong stomachs, very good lawyers and very deep pockets!

Among the things that can and regularly do happen, when the trademark owner discovers such breaches of trademark in a domain-name, are:-

• They can tell you take it down
• They can take the domain from you
• They can take from you any money you've ever made through the site
• They can sue you for additional damages for flagrantly breaching their legal rights

Don't imagine that because "you're helping them to make sales" (as is so often the case, in these circumstances) they'll decide to be lenient. That isn't how it works. The point here is that owning a trademark effectively confers obligations as well as rights on the holder: when it comes to trademark renewal time, if it can be shown that they've knowingly failed to protect their rights with regard to the trademark, that can be held against them. Some companies, for this reason, have the policy of pursuing all breaches of the trademark routinely and without reference to the motives/purposes/circumstances/location of the defendant.

I'm not a lawyer, by the way (did you guess?).

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