Booking.com. B v. v. U.S. Patent & Trademark Office

This case addresses a problem that Booking.com chose to bring upon itself. Because trademark law does not protect generic terms, an online business, like Booking.com, has two options in choosing its domain name. On the one hand, it can choose to operate under a generic domain 1 that describes the nature of the services it offers, and thereby attract the wealth of customers who simply search the web for that service. However, in electing that benefit, the entity accepts a trade-off. It must forego the ability to exclude competitors from using close variants of its domain name. On the other…