Sherlock Holmes is still under copyright, even though his author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died almost 80 years ago.  Actually, some of Conan Doyle’s stories are or appear to be under copyright protection in the United States (not in the UK and not elsewhere), by virtue of an oddity in US copyright laws.  Ordinarily, US copyright protection for works published prior to no later than 1930 (the year of Conan Doyle’s death would have expired well before today.

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Oneok, a natural gas distributor based in Oklahoma, sued Twitter last week for trademark infringement.  Then dropped the case one day later.

Oneok claimed that an unidentified third party had operated an account under Oneok’s name and logo (both registered trademarks, evidently) and, more particularly, issued tweets which “had the appearance of being official statements” of the company.  And therefore, gave the impression that these were authorized statements made by authorized users of Oneok’s trademarks.  See Oneok’s complaint here.

The last part would have been particularly critical to Oneok’s claims of infringement because it would have argued against a defense of parody or commentary or other protected “fair use” of the trademarks.

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Can you trademark a domain name?  Amazon.com is a registered US trademark of the company by the same name, including not just the word “Amazon”; but also the dot com.  There are numerous examples of this, although they have in common the brand value of the name inclusive of the dot com appendage.

How many businesses can say this, really?  More commonly, a web domain reflects the name of the business or the brand or the celebrity (or whatever), and the “.com” is simply a location finder on the internet.  So, for example, “ExxonMobil.com” is not registered as a trademark.  Nor is Apple.com, even though the brands without the .com are.

The issue is a question of what name you’re trying to protect.  Cybersquatting laws (and some famous cases) prevent certain well-wishers from staking claim to web domains of trademarked terms such as “McDonalds.com” and “Walmart.com”.

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