Domains with numbers

[BBB_Guy]

Hello,
Can i use numbers like 007, 911 or something like that in my domain or are they copyrighted?

[Robino]

Yeah, you can use them.

[BBB_Guy]

Are you sure about that

[RTM Communications]

I'm certainly not a legal expert, but I believe that pure numbers (such as 911) are not subject to trademark or IP. I *may* be wrong. I just checked the Porsche site, and their copyright statement doesn't include the term "911".

Rob

[hartlandcat]

You can't "copyright" a single word/number. What you are thinking of is called a Trade Mark. *Generally*, it's best to avoid using registered trade marks in your domains, although it's a bit of a grey area. I will admit, I use a registered trade mark in my domain, and the company that owns that trade mark hasn't fussed about it (and I'm certain they know of my site, since they'd probably visit it as part of their market research). Someone else actually registered a different domain name that used this same trade mark about 3 years before, and since I registered my domain name, a whole catalogue of other people have also registered similar domains which also use this trademark.

However, it's always been in the back of my mind that maybe one day they'll come along and close us all down, but I doubt that'll happen. We all have very "obvious" domains which all end in things like .com, .net, .co.uk and the like, and are all of the same trade mark (yes, it's all the same domain, just with a different tld). From the way I see it, if they'd wanted those domains, they'd have registered them before.

[RobCamp]

Numbers alone should be a safe bet, so if you can snap up 911, Porsche should not be able to complain.

The precedent for this is Intel's Pentium chip. The Pentium is so named because AMD (as well as Cyrix and others) named their chips the same 80386, 80486 as Intel, and Intel could not stop them. Only by going with a textual name (Pentium)for their "80586" chip could they trademark and protect it.

Rob