What is a trademark?
A trademark is a name or logo used by a company to identify its goods or services. For example, eBay® is the name of our company, but it is also a trademark used on our site and various eBay products. Coca Cola® is a trademark used in the sale of soft drinks. Many trademarks are registered, but a trademark need not be registered for an owner to protect it. Trademark laws are primarily designed to protect consumers from confusing one company's goods or services with those of another. Many companies register domain names that contain their trademarks. For example, eBay owns www.ebay.com. The Coca Cola Company owns www.cocacola.com and www.coke.com.

What is trademark infringement?
Trademark infringement usually involves using someone's trademark on a good or service in a way that may lead to confusion as to the source or affiliation of the goods or services. For example, if you are not the Nike® company or authorised by it, it is probably an infringement to sell sports clothes called "Nikestuff." The same applies to domain names. If you operate a website using a domain name that contains someone else's trademark (for example, "www.nikestuff.com"), people seeing that domain name and/or going to your site are likely to be confused that your site is affiliated with Nike when it is not. People may also mistakenly go to your Web site thinking it's connected with the other company, only to find out that it is not. Domain names that may be considered infringing also include intentional misspellings or confusingly similar names (for example, www.wwwebay.com, www.amizon.com). Just because a company hasn't registered all variations of its name or trademark as domain names doesn't mean that others can use those domain names. If the domain names are likely to confuse consumers, they're probably infringing.

What is a domain name?
A domain name is an address that is used for identifying and locating computers on the Internet (for example, unknown www.ebay.com).

* This information is not intended to be legal advice. If you have any doubts about whether you can sell an item or domain name on eBay, we encourage you to contact the trademark owner or consult your own attorney.