Company alleges competitor is infringing its trademarks by using vowel-less version of its own name.
One of strangest ways companies have tried to cope with the lack of cheap available domain names in the past decade is to drop vowels. A prime example was Flickr.com, which dropped the ‘e’ to save a bit of money (though it later acquired Flicker.com).
If you take all of the vowels out of a word, does the word remain the same?
It’s an interesting question, and one that may have to be decided in a trademark lawsuit filed by Private Business Jets, LLC against PRVT, Inc.
The plaintiff operates the website FlyPrivate.com and the defendant uses FlyPrvt.com. The plaintiff alleges the defendant is engaging in trademark infringement and cyber-piracy.
In one sense “private” is descriptive of the services. It’s not just a branded word missing the vowels. Is replacing “private” with “prvt” a new brand or term?
You can read the allegations here (pdf).
Joseph Peterson says
If I were operating a company at FlyPrivate.com, I’d welcome all the free supplemental marketing contributed by the clunky FlyPRVT.com. The latter’s dollars and hours of labor are bound to lead to extra eyeballs for the website owning the fully spelled brand name.
ChuckWagen says
From a quick review of the two company websites, my first impression is you may be under the wrong impression. FlyPrivate to me looks like a cookie-cutter referral type site. FlyPRVT at least claims to have $1B in annual revenue. What’s clunky, specifically?
Joseph Peterson says
@ChuckWagen,
What’s clunky specifically? Specifically, the domain name FlyPRVT.com. That’s clunky.
Really it doesn’t matter that one company might be a referral website whereas the other might be a company with substantial revenue. If the bigger company operates the inferior knock-off domain, that’s their loss. Also, that underscores my point above. A big company dumping marketing dollars on FlyPRVT.com will be inadvertently marketing FlyPrivate.com.
This isn’t a case of a legitimate company versus a parked page. On the contrary, FlyPrivate.com — whose web design you judge to be inferior — would seem to have invested in
(1) A Trademark,
(2) A Vanity 800 Number (641-JETS)
(3) And a website that includes form submissions, a mailing list, and possibly a database
Also, their website says,
“FLYPRIVATE® ACHIEVES 2008 INC.COM RANKING OF TOP 5,000 FASTEST GROWING PRIVATE COMPANIES”
With all this in mind, the clunky FlyPRVT.com hardly seems entitled to their domain.
J.R. says
Since it has become a habit to look first to a SLD with a .com TLD, registration of any whatever identical or similar SLD with any whatever TLD (gTLD, .CC or any of the upcoming vanity etc. TLD’s) is welcome. Dot com domains are used by the most trustworthy companies on Earth, so why bother looking elsewhere? No offense, the but .com, .net, etc. original Internet domain extensions do still will put weight for long.
Acro says
Enforcing one’s mark is the only way to protect it. This is not a case of a domain name infringing on another, which would be resolved via a UDRP; it’s more about tm dilution. Interesting find.