A.M. Rutkowski wrote:

> So the test is "the liklihood of consumer confusion," and there
> is no issue with, for example, porsche.aol.com?

If porsche.aol.com were used by AOL as a site to sell Porsches without
proper authorization, perhaps.  However, generally speaking, people don't
register famous names within their organization's domain with the intent
to market or otherwise "publicize" some other product, service, or good.

It has occurred to me, however, that an organization might wish to enjoin
some other organization from using a famous name associated with them
within their domain if they felt they were losing traffic to the site
with the famous name.  For example, if for some reason, wheaties.ai.mit.edu
starts getting hits from people who "thought" they were accessing the
Wheaties cereal web site (www.wheaties.com), General Mills might ask them
to cease using the name.  I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether a
court would uphold this.  (In a sense, this illustrates the same problem as
typing "whitehouse" into a browser and being taken to whitehouse.com, when
the user "thought" they were going to the White House site whitehouse.gov.)

--gregbo

Reply via email to