There are three key questions. First, likelihood of confusion. If SOME customers think that the second company is affiliated with or endorsed by the brand name company, that's a problem.
You mentioned "regular words". The question is if the words are "merely descriptive." The word "Apple" is of course a word, and a trademark. You can't marketyour brand of smart phone as "Apple" just because apple is a word. You CAN market pie as "apple" because the wired is merely descriptive of the type of pie. We ran into this when we filed a trademark registration for an AVS (adult verification system). Their name was something like eVerify. The ruling was that the name eVerify just described the service as being electronic verification, so it couldn't be registered as a trademark.
Quote:
Originally Posted by onwebcam
If it's "obvious that new site want to bank on that famous name" then I'd say they could obviously clean out your bank account in court.
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That's the third and possibly most important part. If one party is clearly being an asshole and trying to make money by jacking someone else's name, they can expect the judge to treat them like an asshole.
Cops, judges and juries don't take too long to figure out who they think the good guy is, and who the bad guy is. Sometimes they are wrong, of course, and sometimes an expensive lawyer can convince them that the law requires them to let the bad guy get away with it, but most of the time whoever looks like an asshole isn't going to be happy with the result.
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