Looking into the history of the domain, it was previously owned by a company. They had four domain names. One is currently unregistered and available. One is currently in the hands of one of those companies that grabs expired domains and puts a search box and AdSense on them. The third is the one I have. And the fourth is still in use, and looks like the same company, but they do not appear to be selling the things they were under the other domain names.
Tracking the domain (the one I have) in the Internet Archive, it was first used in 2001 (which is backed up by news releases I have found about the company). In 2002, it was replaced with an "coming back soon" type message. That message was dated 2001.
Later in 2002, it appears to have been registered by another company, in the same overall field, but selling a completely different product. That company has since folded or changed its name, because the domain name, different from the site's domain name (I'm guessing it was used as a forwarding domain) now points to yet a different domain name.
The Internet Archive has no index for the site for 2003, 2004 or 2005, or 2006. (I have had it since 2005, and don't have a site for it.)
When the first company had it, they were selling a certain product. I want to use the domain name to offer information on that type of product (with AdSense and all that). The domain name is relevant and I liked it because it was a good match for my company name.
So, I wonder if the domain name is safe to use? My thinking is that, since it was unregistered and freely available, and since they appear not to be in that niche anymore, and since they haven't used the name in at least three years, they can't have a very strong claim on the name, can they? I also did a search in the USPTO, and there are no results for a trademark on the name, neither the name by itself, nor the name plus the .COM.
Any ideas? Yeah, this probably is one of those AAL questions...
Hope for the best, expect the worst. You know what to do.
