We received an interesting complaint last night that I felt compelled to comment on here in order to bring to light some common misconceptions and and see what others thoughts are on the subject.

The person lodging the complaint informed us that we are hosting a site using their copyright information. As it turns out, they own the domain xxxxxpersonalchef.com and our customer’s site, which we are hosting, is xxxxxpersonalchef.ca (made up names).

Hearing the word copyright, the first thing we did was look over the content of both sites to see if there was indeed any merit to the complaint. There was no obvious copying of content in either text or images. Upon rereading the complaint again, it became clear that the person complaining felt that because they had an older site in which the prefix of xxxxpersonalchef had been used longer, they felt the registration of the .ca domain with the same prefix was a copyright infringement.

We informed them that Copyright laws do not apply to domain names in the same way Trademarks apply. The person complaining does not have a trademark for their domain, thus is powerless to do anything about the owner of the .ca. They can of course apply for a trademark, but because the domain in question uses 3 very common words, I doubt they will ever get it.

This is a valuable lesson for everyone. The cost of purchasing the other domains is very negligible. Purchase them if you can before someone else does. Also if you can get a Canadian Trademark or US Trademark, we strongly urge you to do so.