The legal issue of similar business names?

In general, anything that would lead to LL needing to do extra management and/or handle disputes between residents is something they'll avoid doing.

That was my point with my first post to the OP and, as Zaphod said as well, nothing matters as much as the client. They don't know, care and can't be bothered to remember whether your name is THE Botanical Garden or just Botanical Garden, or whether or not a letter is capitalized somewhere - nor should they.

For a store owner it may be all about traffic and competition, but from your customer's point of view, it's just a pain in the butt.
We can't assume everyone has a landmark. I don't know how many times I've searched for a place only to get utterly ticked because they decided to use some pointlessly creative spelling or some name that isn't even remotely memorable (or too much like other place names!)

"Oh, you must check out the botanical garden. I mean THE botanical garden, not the botanical garden. Or was that spelled Botanical GARden? Hmm, maybe bOtAnIcL Grdn? Ack, crap, just visit Apollo"

I have no trouble remembering Armidi

So, by your logic:

Laukosargas would have no right to be pissed by someone naming their sim Svarga Gardens.

Dan Zander would have no right to be pissed by someone naming their sim The Gardens of Apollo

Rezzable would have no right to be pissed by someone naming a sim Greenies Store.

Fallingwater would have no right to be pissed by someone naming their sim Shiny Stuff.

It is one thing to call something Camellia's Botanical Gardens -- another entirely to name your sim to Botanical Gardens when there is already a sim named that which is extremely popular.

Can't you just come up with your own original name? Sheesh

Aside from any ethical issues, why would you want to confuse your customers?

Only to the part of the planet that resides in the USA, like Linden Lab and its servers.

I think you are completely within your rights to be pissed off about this. It would annoy me to no end as well. That's what I was getting at. It may not be illegal to name your sim after someone else's build, but it certainly is unethical and very shady, and if I knew someone had done that, it is incredibly unlikely that I would patronize their store. It's an incredibly weak move.

I wouldn't have a problem with someone using that phrase in a description, because "botanical gardens" has it's own meaning aside from your build. For example: "Trout's SL Botanical Gardens" would be pretty lame, but "Trout's Amazing Plant Store...Come visit our botanical gardens and shop for plants, trees and all your landscaping needs in our beautiful outdoor paradise..." would be ok with me.

If My ND Urown BusinesS Inc manages to get itself involved in some kind of SL drama that turns it into the Evil Place of the Week, you will care a lot that the names are almost the same. With SL hysteria in full force, no one's going to listen or believe if you protest "but we're a completely different My ND Urown Business!"

Name your biz something else.

1. If you work hard on your biz, you are driving more and more traffic to the other guy's biz.

2. If he blows it or does something stupid it will stick to you.

3. Many people will know who came first and figure you are playing dirty pool. And tell their friends.

4. You just may get someone mad enough to sue you, RL.


Trademark law is a funny thing. You don't need to register anything; you don't need to use TM or (R) or *any* of that stuff to have a case.

Sure, all that stuff makes it easier. But in the end, if it's generally known that Business A was doing biz under a certain name and Business B copied it in the same industry, thus causing harm... Business B is gonna get in trouble.

A caveat: sometimes a "similar sounding" name can get away with it. For instance, there was a fairly famous case where a name like "Cosy Corners" sued "Kosy Korners"... and lost (I forgot the exact names).

Law is a funny thing. If it were truly blind justice, we wouldn't need lawyers to make 'good' arguments to win.

When I worked at La Opinion back in the 90s, I think this was 1997 or so, we were in the very beginning stages of developing and launching a website. When we tried to register the domain laopinion.com, we found that it was already registered. Some schmuck was operating a newspaper in San Antonio under the name La Opinion de San Antonio. He had registered virtually every imaginable variation of our name, which had already been hugely established in the publishing world. The Lozanos (Owners of the paper) ended up sueing him, and ultimately prevailed with a summary judgement (which the judge actually hinted at plaintiff to move for, something unusual in and of itself). He argued that he was operating under a variant name.. similar sounding, sure, but diffferent. La Opinion de San Antonio != La Opinion Newspaper. laopinion-sa.com != laopinion.com, etc. He lost it all in the end, and that case is commonly cited in subsequent trademark disputes.

This would get abused. People will sit all day long registering business names they think are popular and then either selling them on for bigger profit or leasing the right to use them to others for simillar bigger amounts. It would in the end be a bad thing I think.

Think internet domain names.

I wouldn't like it at all if someone else started a "Kaimi's" even if they spelled it differently and were selling something I would never sell.

For one thing it would be natural for people to assume that it was a new branch of my empire or that the other Kaimi's was the owner of my business. But mainly I wouldn't like it because Kaimi's is MY name.

What if their name was Kaimi also and they were not aware of you? In the absence of anything saying they could not, they would feel as entitled as you to the name. Just playing devils advocate here.

Yeah, I'm not unsympathetic to another Kaimi who also wants to self name their business. But before I named mine I ran a search and if there had already been a Kaimi's I would definitely have thought of a different name for mine. I wanted a unique name most of all and if a name is taken it's taken.

Sure I understand, I thought we were talking hypothetically though. I would say that anyone who uses a common name in their business is probably asking for problems later down the line if they do not want others using the same name. I mean no offense Kaimi and perhaps your name is uncommon enough for you to be fine but anyone picking Joe's Supermarket should be rethinking that decision is all I mean.

No no you make a good point. There are other Kaimi's in SL and it is understandable for them to want to use their own name, just like I did. I just hope they don't and if by chance Kaimi'S is the name the OP is thinking of using and she's wondering how I would feel about it well the answer is not good.

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/register.htm

Is registration of my mark required?

No. You can establish rights in a mark based on legitimate use of the mark. However, owning a federal trademark registration on the Principal Register provides several advantages


If you are the first to use a mark (company name)... or in Europe if you have a majority market share... then you have a right to claim a trademark.

Any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO. However, you may use the federal registration symbol "®" only after the USPTO actually registers a mark, and not while an application is pending. Also, you may use the registration symbol with the mark only on or in connection with the goods and/or services listed in the federal trademark registration.

Oh, and I checked before I claimed "Wild Style Fashions". There was a band in the 70's called "Wild Style", and that's the only thing that's close

It actually brings up an interesting point. There seem to be at least two types of business in SL. Ones that want to be a serious business and have RL protections for things like their name. However there are those who do it for fun and they could see it as running a pretend business in a pretend world.
Especially in the latter case if they only make enough money to offset their SL expenditure. The tax department would not care about them, the amounts in that case would be too small to worry about. A bit like kids pretending they are running a business when they go washing their family's cars or such for pocket money.

They don't want nor care about RL in that case so do RL business names matter still? This is one of those thorny areas about whether it is more like RL, more like a game or something else.
If it is something else then what is it and what rules should apply?

Well, I have to say if your sim is named "Botanical Gardens" and it upsets you when other people use this term, you were not specific enough in your branding. That would be like me opening up a sim called "The Park" and being upset if anyone described their sim as "a park-like setting" or a sim called "Waterfront" and being upset when someone advertised their own land as "waterfront" in case of it being actually along the water.

Which part of

The Botanical Gardens
vs
Botanical Gardens

did you not grasp there? I'm not talking about Judy's Botanical Gardens, I'm not talking about the Caledon Botanical Gardens, I'm talking about a sim with what is basically the exact same name as mine.

I know that with my last company, and this regards trademarks (and not company names)... if the phrase was "descriptive" e.g. "brown mug" it couldn't be considered markable, whereas if you did something unusual to the phrase and made it "BrownMug" it could then be considered a "name" rather than a descriptive phrase. In the case of my company, the word was "dispatch." Written as "Dispatch" or "dispatch," it is not markable. However, my company did register it as a trademark as "DISPATCH." Odd, eh?

Either way, it's probably best for all to not even approach the issue. It just upsets a lot of people.

This is the wisest post in the thread

Not to be mean but you don't seem to understand that you've kind of named your sim something generic like "the pond" and are getting outraged over others using the word "pond" as the name of their sim. Every city in my state has a "botanical gardens." It's not a unique name. That's what people are trying to tell you. Sticking a "the" in there makes no difference. If I did a search for "botanical gardens" I would not expect to find your business...I'd expect to find a pretty garden-scape or 20 or 58 or 149. The point is I'd not expect to find an outraged sim-owner thinking they owned that name.

Sorry to burst your bubble, I'm just a non-regular-forum-participant SL user. There you go.