Overview

If you are doing e-business on your website, or using the website to advertise goods or services you offer in the "real world," your domain name is also a trademark. Simply put, a trademark is any device that distinguishes your product or service from others in the marketplace, or designates their origin. For instance, say Jonah Ishmael creates an online art gallery that features and sells whale art by various artists. The art gallery is called Jonah and the Whale and resides on a website with the domain name ahab.com. Jonah is using ahab.com as a trademark because it is used to bring visitors to his commercially oriented website. Jonah is also using Jonah and the Whale as a trademark for the particular product being offered on the website—whale art.
Here are some examples of domain names that are also trademarks:
•Amazon.com (online retailer of books, CDs, toys and other items)
•Drugstore.com (online pharmaceuticals sales)
•Nolo.com (online legal information provider and publisher and retailer of legal books, forms and software).
A domain name isn't always a trademark. If ahab.com were a personal, noncommercial website with pictures of Jonah's family, poems he writes from time to time and a statement of his political philosophy, the domain name would not be a trademark. This is because the term ahab wouldn't be used to identify goods or services or an entity doing business on or off the Web.
Also, if a domain name is the same name by which the product or service is typically described, the law will consider it "generic" and won't treat it as a trademark. For instance, the domain name drugs.com uses a word that is the generic term for a class of products. As we point out in more detail in Chapter 4, generic names like drugs.com may make fabulous domain names but will most likely never receive protection as a trademark because the law does not allow monopolies over generic terms.