Amicus brief in Booking.com

Joined by a number of able trademark scholars, I filed this amicus brief in Booking.com in support of neither party, arguing that (1) genericness standards need to take into account the risks of overassertion/overprotection, and (2) unfair competition doctrine provides relief for deceptive uses of even generic terms, but does not allow a ban on the use of such terms--the remedies have to focus on proper additional labeling.  EFF and AIPLA also filed amicus briefs, available here.

One note about the AIPLA brief (in support of neither party), which contends:

... gTLD composite marks should nevertheless be limited to the applicant’s use of the specific terms in combination. For example, the PTO should require the owner of “TOYS.COM” (if it has acquired distinctiveness and is otherwise protectable) to disclaim any right to use “TOYS” or “.COM” apart from the proposed mark as shown. This would potentially allow the trademark owner to argue that a competitor using “TOYZ.COM” is likely to confuse, but should not preclude the use of the generic term “toys” with another gTLD (e.g., “TOYS.BIZ”).  

The first two sentences make sense if TOYS.COM is to be allowed at all, but I have no idea how they expect to get to the last one without committing judges to casual empiricism, which would help preserve competition but which is in deep tension with the idea of the multifactor confusion test as an empirical inquiry. Even if TOYS.COM is supposed to be limited to the combination, it would almost certainly survive a motion to dismiss if they sued either TOYZ.COM or TOYS.BIZ, because the degree of mark similarity is only one factor in the confusion test and both hypotheticals diverge in some respects from TOYS.COM.  Implicitly, AIPLA wants the Court to think that there's some rule that the gTLD is more useful to distinguish between businesses than the spelling of the second-level domain name, at least for second-level domains that are generic on their own (as both TOYS and TOYZ would be).  There is currently no such rule; ACPA cases and UDRP precedent are both decidedly to the contrary (at least for things that are distinctive and not generic terms). See, e.g., Omega S.A. v. Omega Eng'g, Inc., 228 F. Supp. 2d 112, 126 n. 36 (D. Conn. 2002) (“When evaluating whether a domain name is confusingly similar to a trademark, a district court disregards the top-level domain name (e.g. ‘.com’, ‘.org’, ‘.net’ etc.).”). And if your survey expert couldn't get confusion results for TOYS.BIZ at least as extensive as those for TOYZ.COM, you have the wrong survey expert.

Underneath, perhaps, is an intuition about what we talk about in our brief: unfair competition as distinct from trademark as a basis for avoiding consumer deception. If TOYS.BIZ is definitely to be allowed, it is because "toys" is generic on its own, and therefore no amount of consumer confusion should justify TOYS.COM being the only provider allowed to use "TOYS" on its own as a second-level domain name.  But why that is different from TOYZ.COM is a mystery to me--for both, the appropriate answer is to use unfair competition to prevent either registrant from taking other actions that confuse consumers, like imitating the layout of TOYS.COM or otherwise failing to label itself.

A side note for any practitioner readers: I will often seriously consider filing an amicus in a case that raises an interesting legal issue, assuming I can make it work with my schedule. Please feel free to reach out if you think you have a case that would benefit from amicus attention--though of course I can't promise I'll be on your side!