A Los Angeles lawyer has pointed out that the Patent and Trademark Office will analyze applications for trademarks on generic domain names like turkey.com as if the application were only to register the word turkey. New examination guidelines from the PTO state that neither the http://www nor the .com portions of domain names have any special trademark significance. As we have seen in the recent purchase of business.com for $7.5m, great value is placed on ordinary descriptive words coupled with .com, said Andrew Mansfield, corporate attorney and intellectual property expert in law firm O’Melvany & Myers’ Century City office. However, the PTO has made it clear that .com, .org or other suffixes are not part of a domain name trade or service mark and holders will not be able to obtain federal registration of such marks for web sites.
