Website URL &amp; blog name - Trademark I have a plan to create a general blog related to technology and internet marketing and I have chosen the name &quot;LearnIT&quot; and while registering the domain name I found there is already a company called learn it and their domain is &quot;learnit.com&quot; Can I create a blog name with &quot;learn it&quot; and register a domain name &quot;learnit.net&quot;? Would the company make legal problems for my blog? We are not related to the same business and I am not cloning their name. I just got this name suddenly in my brain, and also it is a general term.
&quot;LearnIT&quot; and &quot;Learn it&quot; are both descriptive, and thus are generally weak trademarks. It is not unlikely that a challenge would result in cancellation of any trademark on either, or in allowing a similar trademark in an unrelated category of business. For the matter of that, you don't seem to have determined whether the other company is making any trademark claims. In some countries there is no trademark protection unless a mark is registered. In others, including the US, use without registration can create some protection for a mark. It will also be relevant where the other company is doing business, and where you plan to. Trademark protection is always specific to a particular country, and generally requires proof of use in commerce in each such country (or of a plan to start such use in the near future). Domain registration is a different thing, and is not necessarily tied to a trademark (although registering a domain that infringes an existing trademark will often be disallowed). It appears that &quot;learnit.net&quot; is listed as available. That does not mean that a dispute filed by the other company would not be successful. The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) states in section 2 that: By applying to register a domain name, or by asking us to maintain or renew a domain name registration, you hereby represent and warrant to us that (a) the statements that you made in your Registration Agreement are complete and accurate; (b) to your knowledge, the registration of the domain name will not infringe upon or otherwise violate the rights of any third party; (c) you are not registering the domain name for an unlawful purpose; and (d) you will not knowingly use the domain name in violation of any applicable laws or regulations. It is your responsibility to determine whether your domain name registration infringes or violates someone else's rights. If you register a domain name, and another person or firm complains that the name is &quot;confusingly similar&quot; to an existing name or to a valid trademark, you might be required to participate in an arbitration proceeding under the UDRP, or else forfeit the registration. Note that nothing happens if no one complains. Section 4(s) of the policy reads: You are required to submit to a mandatory administrative proceeding in the event that a third party (a &quot;complainant&quot;) asserts ... that (i) your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and (ii) you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and (iii) your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith. In the administrative proceeding, the complainant must prove that each of these three elements are present. &quot;Bad faith&quot; can be shown by evidence that you obtained the domain for purposes of selling or renting it, not for use; that you intended to prevent a valid trademark owner from obtaining the name, and have engaged in a pattern of such conduct; that your purpose was to disrupt the business of the other; that you intended to attract users who were looking for the other site. The page &quot;What Are 'Look-Alike' Domain Names?&quot; states: An essential element of any domain name dispute is whether the domain name bears some important resemblance to a relevant trademark. The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) refers to this as the “identical or confusingly similar” test. In many cases, a disputed domain name actually contains the trademark, and in other cases it may contain a typographical variation of the trademark (such as by omitting a single letter; transposing two letters; or substituting one letter for another, often adjacent to it on a keyboard). Yet in other cases, a disputed domain name may simply look like the trademark at issue, even if the domain name doesn’t contain the trademark or fall into any of the popular cybersquatting tricks described above. I refer to these simply as “look-alike domain names.” You may wish to determine if the operator of the learnit.com site has in fact obtained a trademark on &quot;learn it&quot;. Most national trademark systems provide a means to search the trademark registers. This will not be conclusive, but may give a reasonable idea. One option is to consult a lawyer skilled in trademark law. Another might be to reach out to the exposition firm and ask if they would have any objection to your proposed blog. If they don't object, the will be no problem. Another option is to choose a domain that is not as similar to that of the existing site. One technique that can help avoid an accusation of bad faith is to provide an notice where someone first opening the blog site will see it, something like: This is XY.net. You may have been looking for XX.com,which is about {short description} If co, click here. with a link to the other site. Such a notice might help establish that you were not using the domain to improperly attract traffic looking for the other site.
"Pastiche" is a literary, not a legal term, and as a professional coder, I would not use it to describe code that to some extent imitated other code. The legal question here is: is your code a derivative work of the code it is based on, and if it is, did you have permission to make that work. Copyright, in an Berne Convention country, which includes the EU, does not protect ideas and concepts, it protects expression. It protects the choices of words and symbols, and other forms of expression. If all you did was study example code, presented for educational purposes, and then write code that performs a similar function, using the same general techniques, then I don't think you have infringed copyright. That, after all, is why people post code to Stack Overflow and similar sites, to allow them to learn how to use specific coding techniques, including in commercial projects. I have used techniques posted to SO to do coding as part of my paid job. The usual test for copying under US law is "substantial similarity". This takes into account cases where there is essentially only one way to say or code something. I don't know the exact tests under the various laws of various EU countries, and they will not all be the same. But I suspect that on this point they are, well, substantially similar :). I can't advise on your specific situation. But if it is as described, I don't think you have a problem.
Both are to some extent correct, but as might be expected, the USPTO site is more accurate. Trademarks owned by virtue of use, rather than registration, are protected only in the market area in where actual use can be documented. Even state registration may be limited to a geographic market area in which use can be shown, and may not extend to the whole state unless use throughout the state, or at least in most major markets in the state, can be shown. As discussed in the news story &quot;Burger King Is Banned From Opening Within 20 Miles Of This Original, Mom-And-Pop Burger King Sign&quot; The owners of a small restaurant branded &quot;Burger King&quot; secured a state-level trademark on that name, but it only serves to exclude the well-known fast-food chain from a 20-mile circle. Remember, the prime purpose of a trademark is to identify the source of goods or services, and to prevent one supplier from benefiting by the reputation of another. In an area where the first supplier does not do business, there is considered to be no such risk of unfair competition. Also, nationwide protection is one of the benefits of federal registration. In addition, a mark is only protected for the same class of goods or services. Nationwide use of &quot;Pear&quot; as a mark for a brand of computer would not prevent use of the same word as a mark for a brand of automobile, say, or for a restaurant chain. Note also that trademarks are normally at most national in scope. A US Federal registration will offer no protection in Canada, or any other country.
Copyright is irrelevant, because names are not protected by copyright. Trademark is relevant: a name can be protected by a trademark. &quot;Yoda&quot; is a registered trademark owned by Lucasfilms, a subsidiary of Disney. There is a list of goods and services where the property right is asserted, so for example you could get sued for peddling art books under this name. It just depends on what your business does. For instance, a plumbing business isn't competing with Lucasfilms w.r.t. that class of goods and services.
You may have issues if you take their content wholesale. Even if they freely distribute them, they still retain copyright. As such, they absolutely can claim copyright. Whether they will or not is another question. Your best bet around this is Fair Use doctrine. You can take a part of their work (e.g: a single question) and do your video based on how you work out your answer, with your video mainly focusing on the 'working out' part (thus satisfying the 'educational purposes' part)
There's no "common law copyright" in the US. There's common law trademark, but copyrights and trademarks are different things. All copyright is based on federal copyright statutes, and an unregistered copyright is just called an unregistered copyright. What an unregistered copyright gives you is almost the same thing as a registered copyright: the exclusive right to exercise various rights (reproduction, distribution, public performance/display, etc.) Registration is required before you can actually file an infringement lawsuit, but it's OK if you only registered it after learning about the infringement. The main reason to register the work early is that you might be able to collect higher damages if it was registered before the infringement. If the work was unregistered when the infringement happened, you can only collect actual damages. If it was already registered, you can instead opt to collect statutory damages. Statutory damages don't require you to show actual loss; instead, the court awards between $750 and $30,000 per work based on what it considers fair. The lower limit can go down to $200 if the infringer had no reason to think they were infringing, and the upper limit can go up to $150,000 if the infringement was willful. You can also collect attorney's fees if it was already registered. In the comments, the question was raised of whether someone else might be able to register the copyright for your work before you and what would happen then. When I say "registration is required before filing a lawsuit," the requirement is that you submit the registration paperwork properly, pay the fee, and wait for the Copyright Office to act on the application. If they accept the registration, you're all set. Even if they refuse, though, you can still file an infringement claim -- you just have to also serve the head of the Copyright Office, who has the option of jumping into the case to argue about whether the work could legally be registered. You can also sue the Copyright Office to get judicial review of a denial under the Administrative Procedure Act (refusal still lets you file infringement lawsuits, but you can't get statutory damages or attorney's fees against an infringer unless the Copyright Office actually accepted the registration).
To answer part of your question, the takedown and restoration process of the DMCA is not required. It is a legal way a hosting site can stay in the clear for copyright infringement. Therefore, if the site didn't take down what you complained about, they're participating in copyright infringement (if that's what's happening). Since they did not take down the material (assuming your DMCA was in the right legal form), if you do sue over copyright infringement you can sue the site as well as whoever uploaded your stuff to the site. I don't think that linking to your stuff would itself be copyright infringement, so I'd suggest consulting a lawyer specializing in IP.
A basic rule of trademark law is that a trademark is protected only for use in the same industry, or in regard to the same general sort of thing. "Maxwell House" for example, is the name of a brand of Coffee, and no doubt a trademark. If A business used it as the name of a brand of mobile home, it would not infringe the mark of the coffee brand. "Java" as a term for coffee , has been slang for any and all coffee at least as far back as WWII. I doubt that it is a currently active trademark in any case. It is, however, the name of a currently active programming language. Calling a new computer technology "Java" would probably infringe that (although the makers of javascript, a quite different computer language, seem to have gotten away with it). But it is hard to see how a realty company would so infringe. Of course there might be details which would cause this name to be infringing in fact, that I have no way of knowing. You could play safe with Sumatra Realty instead. Evin a quickly dismissed suit for trademark infringement could cost a startup time and money that might be a fatal handicap.