Hotels.com denied trademark for domain name

In what must be pretty devastating news to the company that owns Hotels.com, they have been denied the ability to trademark their name because it's too common and generic. This is not the first determination of that decision, either. This latest ruling comes from a Federal Appeals court that is backing up the same decision, originally made by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

In the article that I found about this case, it said that hotels.com tried to argue that adding the "dot com" to the word "hotels" would distinguish it from the generic term. Unfortunately for them, the Federal Court of Appeals didn't agree. In their initial argument to the U.S. Trademark board, the company presented an online survey they had that indicated that 76% of the 277 people who responded to the survey viewed "hotels.com" as a brand name. The board said the study didn't do enough to distinguish a domain name and a brand name to the survey participants. This pretty much leaves the name hotels.com unprotected in terms of anyone else who wants to use it to their advantage, say in advertising. This makes me wonder about all of the famous generic-named website companies there are that are similar to this, whether or not they have trademarks, and if any of the people who start these companies have considered this possibility when they name their companies/domains.