Trademarks and domain names: the check to run before you commit

Owning a domain and owning a brand are two different things, and the gap between them is where money gets lost. A registry will happily let you hold a name that a trademark owner can take from you through arbitration. Nothing in the transfer process checks. The escrow closes, the name moves, and eight months later a letter arrives from a firm in Chicago.

The check is not hard. It's just tedious, and it has to happen before you commit funds rather than after.

What a domain actually gives you

A registration is a lease on a string of characters. It carries no rights in the underlying word. Trademark rights come from use in commerce and, in most systems, from registration with a national office; they attach to a mark used for particular goods and services, not to the word in the abstract.

Which is why delta.com can coexist with a hundred Delta-something trademarks across plumbing, airlines and dental equipment. Same word, different lanes. The question is never "is this word trademarked?" — almost every dictionary word is, somewhere, by someone. The question is whether your use, in your category, will collide with an existing owner's rights in that same category.

Get that framing right and the rest of the work becomes tractable.

The forty-minute search that catches most problems

Start with the registers. They're free and public.

• USPTO TESS (now the Trademark Search system) for the United States. Search the exact string, then search it with common suffixes and prefixes stripped. If you're buying Ravello, also search Ravel, Ravella, Ravelo.
• EUIPO eSearch for the European Union, and the UK IPO register separately since Brexit split them.
• WIPO Global Brand Database to sweep multiple jurisdictions at once. Rougher, but fast.

Then leave the registers and search the open web. Unregistered rights matter. In the US, common-law trademark rights arise from actual use in a geographic market, and a company that has been trading under a name since 2016 without ever filing can still cause you real difficulty. Check Companies House and the equivalent state registries. Check the App Store. Check GitHub, Product Hunt, LinkedIn, Crunchbase. Check whether someone holds the .co, the .io and the handle on every platform, because that pattern usually means an operating business rather than a squatter.

Note what you find, including the dates. A mark filed last month by a two-person startup and a mark held since 1974 by a company with a litigation history are different risks wearing the same clothes.

Reading the classes without a law degree

Trademarks are filed in Nice classes, forty-five of them. Classes 1 to 34 cover goods, 35 to 45 cover services. Software tends to sit in 9 and 42. Clothing is 25. Advertising and business services cluster in 35.

When you find a live mark matching your name, open the record and read three things: the class list, the identification of goods and services in plain text, and the status. The plain-text description tells you more than the class number. "Downloadable software for managing veterinary practice records" is narrow. "Business consulting services" is a barn door.

Ask yourself whether an ordinary customer, seeing both businesses, might reasonably think they were connected. That's roughly the test courts apply, and it's the test a UDRP or URS panel will approach from a similar direction. Adjacency counts against you. A payments company and a banking app are adjacent even in different classes. A payments company and a garden centre are not.

Watch also for status flags. Dead or abandoned marks are not automatically safe, since the owner may still have common-law rights, but they change the calculation considerably. A registration that lapsed in 2009 with no trace of the company online is close to noise.

The names to walk away from

Some patterns are worth refusing regardless of how good the name sounds in a pitch deck.

• A famous mark with a tweak. Adding a letter, a hyphen or a generic word to a well-known brand is the textbook profile of a bad-faith registration. Nikeshoes, Stripe-pay, Getspotify. Panels see hundreds of these a year and they do not deliberate long.
• A name that only makes sense as someone else's. If the value of the domain depends on the association, you're buying the association, and you don't own it.
• A live mark in your exact class held by anyone with money. You may be technically defensible. You will still spend a year and a five-figure legal bill finding out.
• Anything already the subject of a dispute. Search the WIPO and Forum UDRP decision databases for the string. A name with a prior decision attached has history, and history follows it.

The rest is judgement. Plenty of good businesses launched on names with a distant conflict somewhere in class 25, and lived perfectly well.

Where clean names come from

The cheapest trademark strategy is choosing a name nobody else wants. Invented words clear registers easily and become distinctive fast, which is exactly what trademark law rewards. Descriptive names do the opposite: BestCloudStorage is nearly unregistrable as a mark and therefore nearly unprotectable, whatever you pay for the domain.

If you're starting from a blank page, the defining domain search is a reasonable place to begin, and the Name Studio generates coined .com names checked against the live registry, so what it shows you can actually be registered. Coined names are not automatically clear — someone may have invented the same word first — but they fail the trademark check far less often than dictionary combinations.

Buying on the aftermarket, particularly owner-direct, gives you a chance to ask questions before funds move. Ask whether the seller has received any cease-and-desist correspondence about the name. Ask how long they've held it. A seller with nothing to hide answers in a sentence.

When to spend money on a lawyer

Below a certain purchase price, self-searching is proportionate. Above it, it isn't. A clearance search from a trademark attorney — a real one, covering phonetic and visual similarity across relevant classes and jurisdictions — typically runs in the low four figures for a single market. Against a domain purchase in the tens of thousands, plus the cost of rebranding a funded company, that's cheap.

Bring in counsel when any of these is true: you found a live mark in an adjacent class and can't tell how close it is; you're launching in more than two jurisdictions; the name is your company name as well as your domain; or you intend to file a trademark of your own, which you should.

Do the search first, then buy. Transfers through escrow protect you from a seller who doesn't deliver. They don't protect you from a name that was never yours to use.