Social site loses objection for .pin top level domain name.
Social networking site Pinterest has lost an objection it filed with World Intellectual Property Organization over Amazon.com’s bid to get the .pin top level domain name.
One of Pinterest’s challenges was showing some sort of rights and secondary meaning in the term “pin”. Amazon.com pointed out that Pinterest has no registered marks for the word pin. It has 63 pending applications to trademark pin, and only two of those existed before Amazon filed application for the new TLD .pin.
Panelist Alan L. Limbury sums up the reason he denied Pinterest’s objection:
Amazon’s intended use of the .pin gTLD is to operater egistry services for entities within its ownership and control, and also itself to register and use domain names in the .pin gTLD space, such as (perhaps) amazonbooks.pin and specialthingsto.pin. Further, Amazon has indicated in its application an
awareness of the need to respect the trademark rights of others. Should a complaint be made about a second
level registration in the .pin gTLD space, Amazon itself would be the respondent. Accordingly, it is unlikely that Amazon’s Intellectual Property Group would permit registration of a domain name such as pinterest.pin and even if it were to do so, the confusion that would arise would spring primarily from the use of the second-level registration rather than from the .pin gTLD.For these reasons and because the word PIN is a common, descriptive word, the Panel finds that, on the evidence provided by Pinterest in this proceeding, Amazon’s intended use would not create a likelihood of
confusion with Pinterest’s P, PINTEREST or PIN IT marks…
One question still remains, though: what the heck does Amazon want to do with .pin, anyway?
My guess is they want it for the Kindle Digital Media stores.
On the kindle, much like other devices the concept of storing one of your “cloud” media items (book, song, tv show, movie) to your kindle is done with a pin icon, and the concept of pinning is quickly becoming the idea between taking something ephemeral on the cloud and making it local. As such amazon probably presumes that people will start associating digital media with pinning when it comes to using your digital media offline, and as such people might start associating the pin with the digital media in the first place.