Questions Related to Intellectual Property and Patent Systems - Assignment Example

In addition to that the rapid spread of internet and communication technology (ICT) has acted as a wake-up call to many nations to improve their ICT infrastructure and human capital if they are to compete equally with other nations.

Intellectual Property Law (IPL) is a law that is meant to protect entrepreneurs who come up with unique intellectual business ideas (property) and if the ideas are not protected they might be duplicated and used by competitors. There are two main categories of intellectual property; industrial property which covers patents, industrial designs, trademarks, etc, and copyright which deals with literary and artistic works. The paper will close by giving a few recommendations on the way forward for intellectual property law and finally looking at the key important points that will have been discussed during the study.

On December 9, 2008, Dial-A-Mattress filed U.S. Trademark Application Serial No. 78/976/682, seeking to register the mark MATTRESS.COM for service identified as “online retail store service in the field of mattresses, beds, and bedding.” Several third-party websites used by online retailers selling mattresses and/or bedding feature internet addresses (uniform resource locators) ending in mattress.com or containing “mattress” and “.com.” In its trademark application Dial-A-Mattress proffers that the term “.com” evokes the words “comfort” or “comfortable and that part of its mark serves as a mnemonic as well as an indication of the quality of comfort.

The solution to the case in the above-mentioned case, the company (DIAL-A-Mattress), wanted to trademark the domain name “.com” because it claimed that the term “.com” gives an impression of comfort; it based this assumption on the nature of its services. It is however important to note that the term “.com’ refers to one of the most common and popularly used domain names and it has been adopted by millions of commercial companies around the globe hence the term “.com” (commercial). USPTO states that a company’s trademark can be a symbol, word, or a combination of the two (USPTO, 2010).

The main purpose of trademarks to act as the company’s brand name or the symbol that helps the consumers identify the company. There are however other domain names that are used by different organizations and companies depending on the nature of their business. It is important to look at the different domain names that are used n the business world before determining whether the DIAL-A-Mattress company had the right to trademark the term “.com”.