Fight with Amazon.com over .Pin domain name — Pinterest loses

Social site loses objection for .pin top level domain name.

Social networking site Pinterest has lost an objection it filed with World Intellectual Property Organization over Amazon.com’s bid to get the .pin top level domain name.

One of Pinterest’s challenges was showing some sort of rights and secondary meaning in the term “pin”. Amazon.com pointed out that Pinterest has no registered marks for the word pin. It has 63 pending applications to trademark pin, and only two of those existed ahead of Amazon filed application for the fresh TLD .pin.

Panelist Alan L. Limbury sums up the reason he denied Pinterest’s objection:

Amazon’s intended use of the .pin gTLD is to operater egistry services for entities within its ownership and control, and also itself to register and use domain names in the .pin gTLD space, such as (perhaps) amazonbooks.pin and specialthingsto.pin. Further, Amazon has indicated in its application an
awareness of the need to respect the trademark rights of others. Ought to a complaint be made regarding a second
level registration in the .pin gTLD space, Amazon itself would be the respondent. Accordingly, it is unlikely that Amazon’s Intellectual Property Group would permit registration of a domain name such as pinterest.pin and even if it were to do so, the confusion that would arise would spring primarily from the use of the second-level registration rather than from the .pin gTLD.

For these reasons and since the word PIN is a common, descriptive word, the Panel finds that, on the evidence provided by Pinterest in this proceeding, Amazon’s intended use would not create a likelihood of
confusion with Pinterest’s P, PINTEREST or PIN IT marks…

One question still remains, though: what the heck does Amazon want to do with .pin, anyway?