A great deal of litigation has revolved around whether attempts to register domain names that contain a protected trademark are violations. The short answer is that courts strive to find that such attempts are violations. Domain name owners who have usurped trademarked names have been forced to surrender the registered name. In the early days of the Internet, many enterprising netizens registered domain names of famous companies to sell a profit when the company decided it need a Website. On the other hand, mere registration of a domain name that happens to contain a trademark may not be a violation in and of itself.
Trademarks can appear in portions of the URL other than the domain name.
A subdirectory name can use a trademark, or a specific file name can contain a trademark. But a federal judge in California has ruled that such usage is entitled to less protection than domain names because it is merely descriptive and does not entail the likelihood of confusion that domain name usage does. The court found that as long as the content of the page does not lead to confusion about source, then there is no violation when a server uses a trademark as a descriptive indicator. The defense is limited, however, and will generally not avail when there is commercial intent 12 or alternative avenues of communication. 3 Uniform Resource Locator.