TRADEMARK VS DOMAIN NAME: AN ANALYSIS

Trademark is one of the intellectual property rights which is very well known in today's era. Almost every individual is dealing in some way or the other with n no. of trademarks, may be by selling, purchasing, and marketing any of the products or services in the market. Whereas Domain name is parallel to trademark, which means, what trademark does in real life, domain name does in virtual world. It basically helps in the field of selling, purchasing, marketing goods or services online through different websites. The object of trademark is to identify the source or origin of the proprietor selling the goods or services and the object of domain name is to identify the source or origin of goods or services on online portal. Every website has its own domain name by which the customer can very well identify its source or origin.  Secondly, for trademark we have trademark Act, 1999 which deals with all the provisions for trademark. It is not mandatory to register one's mark under the Act, as it's optional. If one does register their mark, it's beneficial as they don't need to prove before court of law. Registration is itself a conclusive proof for existence of the mark. If no registration is done then we have a option of passing off defense in case somebody else is using our mark in the market. But here, one has to prove before the court of law that one was the prior user of the mark in the market. For domain names, in case of any conflict or dispute we have Domain Name dispute resolution forum, which resolves the disputes with regard to domain name.  The leading case on Domain name is: Akaash Arora v. Yahoo Inc.1999 High Court case: In this particular case the high court gave the judgment that yahoo.com and yahooindia.com, though they are separate but still it can cause confusion in the minds of the customer that both the domain name belong to one person or one proprietor. mere by adding any suffix, as in this case “India” is not enough to give perception that its different IP address because the customers may end up believing that it’s the same persons website only for India. therefore, the court held that even if internet users are literate but they are not that much sophisticated to foresee such minor differences. Hence, both trademark and domain name go hand in hand in their own spheres.