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The website owners of Hotels.com have been trying to get trademark status for the domain name for over year, but Friday The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. According to the court, the term “hotels” is too generic to be a trademark. Hotels.com argued that adding the top-level domain .com to it made it their brand. The court disagreed.
Last year Hotels.com conducted a study in which 76% of 277 respondents to their survey associated Hotels.com with their specific brand, but the courts were not swayed. The study, they said, was flawed in not fully making a distinction between a domain name and a brand.
Hotels.com is worried that they would have difficulty suing competitors who use “hotels.com” in Google ads and other search engines to draw traffic to their own sites. It also sets a precedence for other potential generic domains that companies might want to use as trademarks. It could potentially create a web of problems. Because the trademark would be Hotels.com, would the company have the right to dispute Hotels.cm for example? These questions would undoubtedly raise more court cases.
