Choosing Domain Name and Avoiding Lawsuit?

Question

So say I wanted to create the blog "TheSportLad" that is about sport news and "Lad" as in (young man). Say there is a small blog called "TheSportLand" also doing some news about sports. Would I be infringing on anything?

I checked to see if the site has any trademarks registered and it doesn't. The site seems very small with few blog posts. Also, I'm from Europe while the site seems to be registered from the US if that means anything. Would love some information!

PS: the above examples are not the actual domains I'm talking about just similar in nature in terms of the name similarities.

Answer 1

The first step in any infringement analysis is whether or not the two names are confusingly similar. While this is ultimately a question of fact to be determined in litigation, at face value, the two examples you pose:

SportsLad v. SportsLand do not present any realistic prospect for confusion, and sites that exploit common misspellings of protected trademarks are normally not considered to be infringing either.

The fact that the two names have different pronunciations in most dialects of English and that the words have two distinct meanings (rather than one of them not having a meaning) also argues against any argument that the two are confusingly similar.

Relatively modest differences in domain names which have a very limited character set and, as far as I know, are not case sensitive, are generally given the benefit of the doubt as far as distinctness goes.