This essay appeared in Bright Ideas, a publication of the Intellectual Property Law Section of the New York State Bar Association in its Winter 2017 Edition, published January 2018.
- Introduction
The Trademark Act of 1946 defines trademarks and service marks to include “any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof.”[i] Marks composed of lexical and numeric elements (as opposed to images) also can be described as strings of characters. Before the Internet there was no commercial use of such strings other than as marks, but the functionality of the Internet depends on strings of lexical and numeric characters in the form of domain names that serve as electronic addresses. Continue reading….. The Rise of a Secondary Market for Domain Names