Paysite Trademark
 

I will be releasing new paysites and want to avoid domain name abuse with my paysite names so I was thinking about registering trademarks. Any of you guys went this route before? Is it worth the effort in your opinion?

I'm not a lawyer and these are only my personal opinions. If you need legal advice, you should hire qualified legal counsel.

Personally, I think you'd be flushing your money down the toilet in most cases. The immoral and scandalous provision in 15 U.S.C. 1052(a) is a major hurdle to registering a trademark for an adult related word/phrase.

Thanks for your kind opinion. Of course I am not looking for legal advice, but for personal experiences. What do you base your suggestion on? I know of various adult sites that carry trademarked names and logos and that have successfully filed suites and won.

Losses resulting from domain squatting and content theft are way easier to battle with trademark registration than without.

Ask Danger Dave if he is still lurking around, he trademarked his site and name a long time ago and I seem to remember it gave him a lot of leverage in cease and desist cases with infringing websites

Meatpounder, a pay site works differently than a free site or tgp you want to trademark.

Trademarking a paysite? I don't think I would. Just buy some of the close domains, the hyphens, the .orgs and so on. Otherwise most others that buy similar domains I'd assume will be sending traffic to your site (if you have an affiliate program).

That's true, but it still cost money. These types of battles often come down to which party is willing to spend the most money, although if you own a trademark often a letter from your attorney will take care of of the situation.

It depends.

If the name of your site is xxx-porn-site.whatever then you can't trademark it because those are generic terms. You can't trademark coffee or blue jeans either. If you're name is Bob Aardvark Smith and you run bob-aardvark-smiths-homemade-xxx.whatever then you can trademark the name and stop people from starting any adult site with Bob Aardvark Smith in the title.

The real question is do you have the deep pockets not only to obtain the trademark but defend it?

One other item on your list for consideration is whether you plan to sell your paysite(s) and affiliate program someday. It's possible that having trademarked names may make the sites more valuable in the mind of a potential buyer.

Again, these are all just my personal opinions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you can't get trademarks for an adult company. The adult brands Vivid, Hustler, Playboy, Twisty's etc. are valuable trademarks. However, these are arbitrary words that don't contain immoral or scandalous words/phrases.

You should also note that arbitrary and coined words/phrases have greater degrees of trademark protection than descriptive words/phrases. Most paysites don't use arbitrary words, but rather descriptive words or phrases. When you said trademarks for paysites, I was under the impression that you meant domains containing words like fuck, porn, pussy, tits, ass, dick, cock, sluts, etc. Such paysite names would have two things going against them with regards to trademarks, weaker protection from being descriptive and high probability of getting denied at the USPTO due to the immoral and scandalous provision. With that being said, the immoral and scandalous provision is related to U.S. trademarks. It's possible to get a trademark in another country, even if the U.S. denies it.

In any case, trademark rights are created from usage. You do not have to officially register a trademark with the government to create trademark rights. Registered trademarks just offer greater degrees of protection. So technically, you can still have your attorney send out C&Ds without having a registered mark.