Search

Though the trademark holder registered his trademark as a domain name, legal scholars and courts did not clarify the legal character of the domain name. To this point, the debate about the nature of domain names was limited to whether the domain name is nonintellectual property or a kind of intellectual property. Even for those who believe that domain names would have intellectual property rights, the essence of this right is still wrapped up in mysteries. More often than not, the court's decisions were limited to considering the domain name as intellectual property or not until the supreme high court in America decided to register the domain name booking.com as a trademark. This revolutionary decision would change the previous conceptions about the nature of domain names. This paper sheds light on how the supreme court decision would give the momentum to consider a domain name as a trademark, which paves the way as the author believes a domain name can be considered a digital trademark, bearing in mind that the medium, in which the domain names can be active, is the digital space.

At incorporation with World intellectual property organization, ICANN has created administrative mechanisms to solve contested domain names and other rights related to the use of trademarks in Cyberspace. In this context, this mechanism called UDRP was limited to general top-level domain names because at the early beginning of the world wide web, the conflicts were basically surrounded by domain names chains such as .com, .org.net with high trade value. On top of that, and because the increasing demand in the domain names industry was huge, ICANN seeks to pump new domain names chains into the market to encounter such an increasing demand for domain names. Accordingly, this step has increased the conflict while the UDRP mechanism was limited to solving the conflicts over top-level domain names. In this connection, ACANN had to find another mechanism to solve other conflict-related with the new gTLD. This article tries to shed light on these remedies and their effectiveness in solving such conflicts.

Since Cyberspace has emerged, a new phenomenon, among other things, has shaped the relationship of the digital community's stakeholders. In this regard, the relationship between the two leading digital community's stakeholders (domain name owners and trademarks' holders) has been described more often than not as unstapled and conflicting relations over potential interests, profits, and commercial dignity of brands. At the early time of the digital revolution, the spider web was a double edge sword on both sides of commercial and legal technical aspects. One of these challenges was domain names' Cybersquatting. With the absence of legal organizing rules, the main obstacles are present in unclarity of the legal nature of domain names' Cybersquatting, at least at the early time of Cybersquatting demonstration as legal cases problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the main goal of (TRIPS) agreement was established to organize Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, some new rights related to intellectual property have arisen away from the scope of this agreement. One of these issues was domain names. Initially, it was argued that there is no relation between domain names and trips agreement due to the fact that domain names are relatively new issue comparing to establishment of TRIPS agreement. This might be right to a point with taking into consideration the unclear nature of domain names per se. However, revealing the real nature of domain names might bollix things up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aimed to explore the theoretical grounds for the provision of trademark protection based on the dilution theory and economic-social planning theory with shedding a light on famous, non-famous and luxury trademarks. Based on the economic-social-planning theory, it's necessary to protect all trademarks because there are economic and social benefits derived from providing such protection. Such benefits include: saving the searching cost incurred by the customer for searching for products that meet their needs. The study concluded that the counterfeited non-famous trademarks can be protected by the customer confusion's calming. According to that study it can be concluded that trademark owner shall claim that customers will not be able to distinguish between the product of the original non-famous trademark and product of the fake trademark in case that the famous trademarks are counterfeited, it can be protected by dilution's claiming, but not confusion due to the fact the customers can distinguish between the product of the original famous trademark and the fake one. However, the owner must prove that the trademark is famous. Luxury trademarks can be protected through anti-dilution protection methods by default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]