Decisions · 85635277
In re AC Webconnecting Holding B.V.
Serial No. 85635277 · Decided 2020-09-15 · Other
What happened
Refusal affirmed — the Board held that .CAM (in plain text) cannot be registered even on the Supplemental Register for webcam-related business, telecommunication and entertainment services, because consumers would see .CAM only as a generic top-level domain ending, not as a brand identifying one company.
The marks
Applicant
.CAM (standard characters)
Extensive identical list of services in International Classes 35, 38, 42 and 45, including business management/consulting services (Class 35), telecommunications/database/Internet access services (Class 38), software design/development and website hosting/optimization services (Class 42), and domain name registration, legal services, and consultancy related to domain names with the TLD appearing in the mark (Class 45); application on the Supplemental Register under Section 44(e) of the Trademark Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1126(e), based on OHIM Registration No. 010483501
Why this decision is significant
Precedential post-Booking.com application of the gTLD framework on the Supplemental Register: .CAM held incapable of functioning as a mark under Section 23 absent evidence of source significance. Useful for any dot-extension branding question.
Research significance is Trademark Valet's editorial rating of how useful a decision is to practitioners. It is not a statement of precedential weight — that is the separate Precedential field, which comes from the Board.
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The original record
Read the opinion and every filing on the Board's own docket. The summary above is our paraphrase, not a quotation from the opinion. The opinion is the authority.
Who checked this
Not yet reviewed by an attorney. This summary is generated from coded data, and it says so until a lawyer has read it.
Provenance — Written from the opinion; research-significance tier confirmed.
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