Quote:
|
Originally Posted by John Marco
Not legal advice but Fish & Richardson (a large intellectual property law firm) indicated to us that we couldn't trademark Webcams.com due to it being a generic name (although we could trademark logos, specific phrases, etc). I don't see why blockbuster would be any different since it was a generic word well before Blockbuster Video came along.
|
You canīt register a term which is generic, thatīs right. So you canīt register the term "webcam" for a webcam business. But you can for example for a car.
Generally speaking a trademark consists of two important parts. The first is the term itself. The other is the Nice classification, which describes the variaty of products the term is protected for.
BLOCKBUSTER is registered first in 1985 in Europe and now consists of a large variety of terms related with BLOCKBUSTER or containing BLOCKBUSTER.
So the chances are good that they can turn down the domain bloxbuster. Anyway, fighting in this case will be pretty expensive and itīs only woth it if the guy makes a decent amount of money with this domain.
I canīt tell you at this time if the guy is safe or not, because there are many facts missing to judge the case. But at least I can tell you that it could become a problem for sure.
As i told before, he should contact a trademark lawyer in Belgium to be sure. And he should contact the lawyer BEFORE talking to the trademark ownerīs law firm.