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Donuts beats trademark owner to .coach

Kevin Murphy, September 10, 2014, 09:32:08 (UTC), Domain Registries

Donuts has won the right to the new gTLD .coach, after an exact-match trademark owner withdrew its bid.
Coach Inc is a chain of clothing and accessories outlets, best known for its handbags, founded in New York in 1941.
The company owns coach.com, but withdrew its application for .coach this week, leaving Donuts unchallenged.
Coach had filed a Legal Rights Objection against Donuts, claiming .coach would infringe its trademark, but the objection panelist disagreed (pdf).
The panelist agreed instead with Donuts that “coach” has multiple meanings, and that that was “a risk that the Objector assumed when it adopted as its trademark a common dictionary word.”

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Comments (2)

  1. Ms Domainer says:

    I would definitely avoid any .coach domains.
    First, it’s too specific.
    Second, too many chances to inadvertently to cybersquat on the Coach brand. Donuts MAY end up selling this to the Coach people.

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      If that was to happen, we would have seen a Donuts withdrawal… perhaps Donuts already settled with them by giving some interesting domains (clothing.coach, bag.coach, handbag.coach) and/or some DPML entries, so they might be already in a good position to defend from cybersquatting.

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