A generic name – the name of a class of products or services – is ineligible for federal trademark registration. Booking.com, an enterprise that maintains a travel-reservation website by the same name, sought federal registration of marks including the term “Booking.com.”
Both a PTO examining attorney and the PTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board concluded that the term “Booking.com” is generic for the services at issue and is therefore unregistrable. “Booking,” the Board observed, means making travel reservations, and “.com” signifies a commercial website.
The Board then ruled that “customers would understand the term booking.com primarily to refer to an online reservation service for travel, tours, and lodgings.” Alternatively, the Board held that even if “Booking.com” is descriptive, not generic, it is unregistrable because it lacks secondary meaning.
Booking.com sought judicial review, and the District Court determined that “Booking.com” – unlike the term “booking” standing alone – is not generic. Having determined that “Booking.com” is descriptive, the District Court additionally found that the term has acquired secondary meaning as to hotel-reservation services. For those services, the District Court therefore concluded, Booking.com’s marks meet the distinctiveness requirement for registration.
The PTO appealed only the District Court’s determination that “Booking.com” is not generic. Finding no error in the District Court’s assessment of how consumers perceive the term “Booking.com,” the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the court of first instance’s judgment.
In so ruling, the appeals court rejected the PTO’s contention that the combination of “.com” with a generic term like “booking” “is necessarily generic.” Dissenting in relevant part, Judge Wynn concluded that the District Court mistakenly presumed that “generic.com” terms are usually descriptive, not generic.
According to the PTO, adding “.com” to a generic term – like adding “Company” – can convey no source-identifying meaning. That premise is faulty, for only one entity can occupy a particular Internet domain name at a time, so a “generic.com” term could convey to consumers an association with a particular website.
Moreover, an unyielding legal rule that entirely disregards consumer perception is incompatible with a bedrock principle of the Lanham Act: The generic (or non-generic) character of a particular term depends on its meaning to consumers, i.e., do consumers in fact perceive the term as the name of a class or, instead, as a term capable of distinguishing among members of the class.
The PTO’s policy concerns do not support a categorical rule against registration of “generic.com” terms. The PTO asserts that trademark protection for “Booking.com” would give the mark owner undue control over similar language that others should remain free to use.
That concern attends any descriptive mark. Guarding against the anticompetitive effects the PTO identifies, several doctrines ensure that registration of “Booking.com” would not yield its holder a monopoly on the term “booking.”
The PTO also doubts that owners of “generic.com” brands need trademark protection in addition to existing competitive advantages. Such advantages, however, do not inevitably disqualify a mark from federal registration. Finally, the PTO urges that Booking.com could seek remedies outside trademark law, but there is no basis to deny Booking.com the same benefits Congress accorded other marks qualifying as nongeneric.
Although the parties here disagree about the circumstances in which terms like “Booking.com” rank as generic, several guiding principles are common ground. First, a “generic” term names a “class” of goods or services, rather than any particular feature or exemplification of the class. Second, for a compound term, the distinctiveness inquiry trains on the term’s meaning as a whole, not its parts in isolation. Third, the relevant meaning of a term is its meaning to consumers.
Under these principles, whether “Booking.com” is generic turns on whether that term, taken as a whole, signifies to consumers the class of online hotel-reservation services. Thus, if “Booking.com” were generic, we might expect consumers to understand Travelocity – another such service – to be a “Booking.com.”
Opposing that conclusion, the PTO urges a nearly per se rule that would render “Booking.com” ineligible for registration regardless of specific evidence of consumer perception. In the PTO’s view, which the dissent embraces, when a generic term is combined with a generic top-level domain like “.com,” the resulting combination is generic. In other words, every “generic.com” term is generic according to the PTO, absent exceptional circumstances. The PTO’s own past practice appears to reflect no such comprehensive rule.
Thus, consumers could understand a given “generic.com” term to describe the corresponding website or to identify the website’s proprietor. We therefore resist the PTO’s position that “generic.com” terms are capable of signifying only an entire class of online goods or services and, hence, are categorically incapable of identifying a source.
The PTO also invokes the oft-repeated principle that “no matter how much money and effort the user of a generic term has poured into promoting the sale of its merchandise …, it cannot deprive competing manufacturers of the product of the right to call an article by its name.” That principle presupposes that a generic term is at issue. But the PTO’s only legal basis for deeming “generic.com” terms generic is its mistaken reliance on Goodyear.
While the court rejects the rule proffered by the PTO that “generic.com” terms are generic names, the court does not embrace a rule automatically classifying such terms as nongeneric. Whether any given “generic.com” term is generic depends on whether consumers in fact perceive that term as the name of a class or, instead, as a term capable of distinguishing among members of the class.
The PTO’s principal concern is that trademark protection for a term like “Booking.com” would hinder competitors. But the PTO does not assert that others seeking to offer online hotel-reservation services need to call their services “Booking.com.”
Rather, the PTO fears that trademark protection for “Booking.com” could exclude or inhibit competitors from using the term “booking” or adopting domain names like “ebooking.com” or “hotel-booking.com.” The PTO’s objection, therefore, is not to exclusive use of “Booking.com” as a mark, but to undue control over similar language, i.e., “booking,” that others should remain free to use.
That concern attends any descriptive mark. Responsive to it, trademark law hems in the scope of such marks short of denying trademark protection altogether. Notably, a competitor’s use does not infringe a mark unless it is likely to confuse consumers. In assessing the likelihood of confusion, courts consider the mark’s distinctiveness: “The weaker a mark, the fewer are the junior uses that will trigger a likelihood of consumer confusion.”
Booking.com concedes that “Booking.com” would be a “weak” mark. The mark is descriptive, Booking.com recognizes, making it “harder… to show a likelihood of confusion.” Furthermore, because its mark is one of many “similarly worded marks,” Booking.com accepts that close variations are unlikely to infringe. And Booking.com acknowledges that federal registration of “Booking.com” would not prevent competitors from using the word “booking” to describe their own services.
The PTO also doubts that owners of “generic.com” brands need trademark protection in addition to existing competitive advantages. Booking.com, the PTO argues, has already seized a domain name that no other website can use and is easy for consumers to find. Consumers might enter “the word ‘booking’ in a search engine,” the PTO observes, or “proceed directly to ‘booking.com’ in the expectation that online hotel-booking services will be offered at that address.”
Those competitive advantages, however, do not inevitably disqualify a mark from federal registration. All descriptive marks are intuitively linked to the product or service and thus might be easy for consumers to find using a search engine or telephone directory. The Lanham Act permits registration nonetheless.
And the PTO failed to explain how the exclusive connection between a domain name and its owner makes the domain name a generic term all should be free to use. That connection makes trademark protection more appropriate, not less. The court did not find any cause to deny Booking.com the same benefits Congress accorded other marks qualifying as nongeneric.
The PTO challenges the judgment below on a sole ground: It urges that, as a rule, combining a generic term with “.com” yields a generic composite. For the above-stated reasons, the court declined a rule of that order, one that would largely disallow registration of “generic.com” terms and open the door to cancellation of scores of currently registered marks. Accordingly, the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit regarding eligibility for trademark registration is Affirmed.
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