Could you be infringing on someones trademark with this?

I am not a lawyer, but this is my understanding.

There are two factors you need to consider:

1. First is trademarks

2. second is UDRP

3. TOS


Trademarks are a legal issue. Trademark holders need to enforce them to protect them, and many do so. They do not necessarily register them, but many do. And they usually apply to a particularly area of business or commerce. That's you would get in trouble if you tried to sell your own homemade "Apple" computer, but wouldn't (or shouldn't) if you tried to sell an "apple pie". Some marks are however so distinctive, usually invented words, they have protection outside their product domain - e.g. I wouldn't try to set up "Exxon computers" or "Pepsi Cola telecoms".


UDRP is an arbitration process used for determining domain disputes (people can still go to court as well). Read about it here: Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I would think you would be on safe ground (from UDRP not necessarily if there was a court casse), if you choose generic words (even if some are trademarked) provided you actually use the domain, don't park it, don't try to sell it to the trademark holder, don't try to blackmail the trademark holder, and don't do any of the bad faith type things listed, and actually properly answer any UDRP complaint filed against you. You can view all past UDRP cases, so you can see the kind of decisions that were made in the past and why.


Finally there are terms of service. You might find that if you participate in affiliate programs or other programs they have rules about domain names. So if you live in a village in the Brazilian rainforest, and set up a site about your village containing the word "amazon" you might survive a UDRP challenge, and even a trademark challenge (assuming you don't sell books) - but I wouldn't try joining the Amazon affiliate program with that domain!

Sunil has covered most of the aspects but here are a couple of other points.

I see you are based in Ireland, so you will primarily be concerned with the Irish Patents Office:
Irish Patents Office - Home

However assuming that your website will be targeting US traffic, you'll also want to make use of the US Patents and Trademark Office:
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS)

Those two search engines should allow you to check that domain names you think of haven't been trademarked already. Generally speaking, a generic noun such as "candles" would not be allowed to be registered unless the applicant could prove that they were already using it as a business name or mark.

Hope that helps.

Trademark laws are different in different countries.

I read recently about the word "memory" being a very broad trademark in Germany. The company that owns it complained to Apple about apps using it their name, and hence Apple decided all the apps using it had to be renamed - I guess this falls under point 3.

That said, if your word is not an invented word, and is truly generic, and it's not bad faith attempt to leach of somebody else, I say go for it. If you are not acting in bad faith, you will almost certainly be okay, the cases were good faith actors get into trouble on these issues are rare, rare enough to make the news.

I'd worry about the thing that affects 95% of businesses (whether you are making enough money), rather than thing that affects 0.01% of businesses - some obscure trademark dispute coming after.