E-Commerce Law: To Digg or Not to Digg?

Most blog readers are probably familiar with Digg, the popular social bookmarking site, from the ubiquitous "Digg this!" buttons which end posts throughout the blogosphere. This week, acting on the advice of their trademark counsel, Digg has asked users to stop incorporating the term "digg" in their website and domain names, citing a concern that such use may cause Digg to "run the chance of losing [the trademark "Digg"] . . . which would suck."

According to the post on Digg the blog, Digg doesn’t "want to shut anyone down (not even the clone sites), all we ask is that you avoid using the name 'digg' in your website names/domains. We're looking to see if we have any other options." As one might expect, the post has elicited a variety of responses, ranging from anger ("Kevin, asking us to respond to this is the dumbest thing you have ever done. I expected better from you.") to concern ("I own www.diggfan.com and have since November 2005. Is this a violation of your trademark?") to understanding ("Why is everyone hating on digg/Kevin for enforcing their trademark? Regardless of what digg represents, it's still a business . . . .").

Digg’s situation is merely the latest in a series of recent examples of e-commerce businesses becoming victims of their own success. As this site has discussed, the success of Google has forced it to address the trademark implications of the term "google" entering the common vernacular (and, somehow, come to grips with the public perception that employing a large, aggressive legal team is inconsistent with the company’s motto, "Don’t be evil."). Though Digg has recently focused on the use of the term "digg" in unaffiliated website and domain names, it suffers from a similar, if not more dangerous, "genericide dilemma." Literally tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of blogs use the term "digg" as a verb, meaning "to bookmark using a social bookmarking site, particularly Digg.com." Though "digg" has not yet appeared as a general term in any popular dictionary, it is clearly part of the blogosphere lexicon ("blexicon?").

In the Internet Age, word usage spreads much faster and farther than ever before so the threat of "genericide" and traditional trademark infringement is far greater than in the past. E-commerce businesses, in particular, must plan early to protect the value of their trademarks; by the time many businesses realize that they own something worth protecting, it may be too late.

Internet users, some of whom regard the Internet as a vast, unregulated place where ideas have no "owners" and "big business" is evil, may not all support these efforts to protect intellectual property. However, such protection is a necessary part of doing business and one which, ultimately, encourages innovation by protecting the financial motivation for developing and implementing new ideas.

For more information on the genericide of Google and on methods companies use to protect the value of trademarks, see The Genericide of Google, Avoiding Trademark Genericide, and Maybe Google’s Not Concerned About Genericide Afterall.