{"id":26472,"date":"2020-06-30T17:06:24","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T00:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=26472"},"modified":"2020-06-30T17:06:24","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T00:06:24","slug":"supreme-court-rules-com-ok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=26472","title":{"rendered":"SUPREME COURT RULES .COM .OK"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for online travel agency Booking.com to trademark its name, ruling that the domain name is distinct enough to qualify for registration.<\/p>\n

The decision rejects a sweeping argument pushed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that the combination of a generic term and “.com” cannot be trademarked. Intellectual property law in the U.S. doesn’t allow companies to trademark generic terms.<\/p>\n

The court said in an 8-1 decision that certain combinations of two generic terms \u2014 in this case, “booking” and the domain name “.com” \u2014 are eligible for trademarking.<\/p>\n

“In circumstances like those this case presents, a ‘generic.com<\/a>‘ term is not generic and can be eligible for federal trademark registration,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.<\/p>\n

Ginsburg reasoned in her decision that consumers understand Booking.com to be a distinctive entity and not a label for a group of travel bookers.<\/p>\n

“Under these principles, whether ‘Booking.com’ is generic turns on whether that term, taken as a whole, signifies to consumers the class of online hotel-reservation services,” she wrote. “Thus, if ‘Booking.com’ were generic, we might expect consumers to understand Travelocity \u2014 another such service \u2014 to be a ‘Booking.com.’ We might similarly expect that a consumer, searching for a trusted source of online hotel-reservation services, could ask a frequent traveler to name her favorite ‘Booking.com’ provider.”<\/p>\n

Justice Stephen Breyer was the lone dissenter in the decision, writing in his opinion that “a top-level domain such as ‘.com’ has no capacity to identify and distinguish the source of goods or services. It is merely a necessary component of any web address.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26473,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26472\/revisions\/26473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}