Hotels.com loses trademark status

In a quiet post on the Media Post website we found an interesting article about hotels.com losing their trademark status. It appears as though the word "hotels" is simply too generic a word to trademark, and even "hotels" with the ".com" added is too generic. Despite the efforts of several surveys to convince the courts otherwise the "U.S. Court of Appeals for the federal circuit disagreed."

Media Post smartly assumes that the biggest impact of this is that hotels.com can't stop other companies from bidding on their domain name, in fact as of this morning a search for "hotels.com" shows that Priceline, Travelocity and several other players are bidding on their domain name.

This reminds us of the lawsuit against Google and Yahoo by American Airlines. We think American has a better shot at protecting their trademarked name than hotels.com did, but the whole battle over bidding on other people's domains/trademarks continues to heat up in interesting and unusual ways.