URL Trademark Infringement?

[Richard S]

As a newcomer I have been doing much reading and research. I figured that going the Affiliate route as well as promoting a specific line of e-books that I have purchased resale rights for. While reading Rosalind's "Super Affiliates Handbook" I came across a point that using a trademarked name in a URL is infringement. Does that mean URL's such as masterebay and ebaysecrets (no, those aren't mine) would be a problem? I sure hope not because I just registered a boatload of domain names that include the word "ebay". It's not as though I'm tring to compete with ebay but to offer information on how to use it which I believe should be a benefit to ebay.

[Jim Hutchinson]

You should check the eBay terms of service to see how they handle that. Be careful putting any company name in the domain name. I have had 2 trademark infringement notices from other companies. One was from e-gold, LTD because I had a site that offered info on their services and named the domain egoldinfo.com. Changing that one to vgoldinfo.com was a work-around.

The other one was for credit restoration information named ficotraining.com. The word FICO is trademarked and when I got it to the top of the search engines, Fair Isaacs company forced me to shut the site down and redirect the domain to their site.

Now I check for trademarks before using a popular name before spending time and money to register a domain and building a site on it.

Jim

[Richard S]

Jim

Thanks for the quick response. Sounds like I've got to do some research on this. I'm sure that any company that has a trademark will have it protected in any way that would prevent another competing entity from profiting from the use of their name. I just never considered it as applying to domain names used for the purpose of promoting the trademarked owners business.