Comment by ryan29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan29 | Hacker News Reader

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I was trying to decide this a few years ago when I found the best .com I'll ever own. It's only 8 characters and I was able to get matching social media handles everywhere but Twitter.

My main concern was that someone with more money than me could come along, start using it, trademark it, and make it unusable for me. I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I can't get a trademark personally and transfer it to a business in the future

In the meantime I decided it was worth the money to buy every decent TLD as a way of discouraging someone else from trying to use the same name. It's not cheap, but it's cheap in the context of what people like the OP pay for a decent .com.

I pay about $200 / year in total to renew about a dozen matching domains. I can hold onto those for 20 years and it'll still cost less than the asking price of a half decent .com.

Think of the .net and .org as a $3 month expense for brand protection. I'm from Canada where .com and .ca are used pretty equally. I remember about 10 years ago when a local computer store only registered one of them and ended up with an unhappy customer redirecting the other to a porn site. Would you pay $3 / month to avoid dealing with that?

> I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I can't get a trademark personally and transfer it to a business in the future

Trademarks are a bit of a pain, but you totally can get the trademark registered to you personally and transfer it to a different entity later.

The main things people miss about trademarks is that they're category-specific (If I have trademark "Foo" for a food product, that doesn't prevent someone else from getting trademark "Foo" for sporting goods), and that you have to actively be doing business (in that category) using the trademark first. You can't register the trademark until after you've been engaging in commerce with it.

> You can't register the trademark until after you've been engaging in commerce with it.

Is that US? I'm in Canada. I think we can register before commercial use [1]:

> Another of your responsibilities as the owner of a trademark is to use the trademark in Canada. If you do not use it, the registration could be expunged from the Register of Trademarks by the Registrar. The Registrar could start summary expungement proceedings, after three years beginning on the day on which a trademark is registered

To me, that sounds like you have to use it within 3 years of registering and I didn't see anything requiring commercial use prior to registration in the linked info.

We also have a ~3 year backlog for applications and I don't know if the trademark ends up registered with the filing date or the issuance date. It's the kind of thing that's complicated enough that I wouldn't want to risk screwing it up, so I'm waiting until I can pay someone that knows what they're doing.

TLDR; It's complicated and expensive, especially compared to the simplicity of pulling out a credit card and registering a dozen TLDs. Lol.

1. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canadian-intellectual-prope...

Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I was talking about the US.

You can register before commercial use in the US (filing status 1B). But there is a deadline before which you do have to start using the mark in commerce, and then update your application with the USPTO, otherwise it will expire.

I didn't know that! Thanks for educating me.

>My main concern was that someone with more money than me could come along, start using it, trademark it, and make it unusable for me.

This happened recently with substack.net.

I hope substack.com doesn't pull a shit move on substack.net like nissanusa.com tried on nissan.com

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