: Registering a domain name with a trademark in it One of our competitors is lets say called WidgetMaker. They target Macs. We target Windows computers. WidgetMaker is a trademarked term.

@Deb1703797

If you're in direct competition and they're litigious, you'll lose.

If it's McDonalds, you will always lose even if you're only an auto repair place.

If it's cooperative and non-competitive, like WindowsSecrets, you might get away with it or if like SparkFun, have to negotiate for licensing from the Sparc consortium even though it's Spark and you purvey neither information or goods dealing with Sparc architecture.

This is a kind of lame question that gets asked all the time and the answer is "it depends on the company you're messing with and how closely they guard their trademarks and service marks."

Go ahead and buy in and let us know the results in 5 years and we'll be able to give you an answer as to that particular entity you decided to tick off. <grin>

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@Sarah324

As always, IANAL.

You can register it, but they could easily take it away from you as a violation of their trademark. You purchased the domain after they trademarked that name and clearly are trying to capitalize on it.

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