The company has filed a complaint to get ownership of the domain name

Mar 10, 2012 15:21 GMT  ·  By

Google has just launched a massive rebranding campaign for the Android Market and its media and entertainment related products, Google Music, the eBookstore and the movie rental store.

Google Play is now the unifying brand and the Market, the music app and so on are all housed at play.google.com. But that's not the only Google Play related domain out there, GooglePlay.com is very much alive as well. There's just one problem, the domain isn't Google's, at least not yet.

Google has filed a complaint against the owner of GooglePlay.com, a Japanese resident it seems, with the National Arbitration Forum to take ownership of the domain, Fusible.com reports.

The company filed for a trademark on Google Play just one day before launching the brand.

That won't matter much since it's not the "play" part that Google is going base its complaint on - any domain name with "google" in it that doesn't belong to Google has every chance of being reposed by the giant company.

Google has a strong case, "google" is a well known brand and it's been around long enough. It's also a trademark name.

What's more, it's highly unlikely that anyone other than Google will get a trademark on Google Play, so even if the site has been around since before Google's trademark application, the company has a case.

All it has to do is to prove that the domain name being targeted is very similar or identical to a Google trademark. It's safe to say that GooglePlay.com meets this requirement

Another requirement is that the current owner has no rights or legitimate use for the domain name. The site is currently filled with ads and nothing more. The final requirement is to prove that the domain name was registered in bad faith or is being used as such. Again, it's filled with ads, so Google won't have a tough time proving this either.