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Originally Posted by Ryu
Well, I'd say it's the intention that matters. In your sample case, "Cool smoking wheels" is a very unique combination of words, and there's no doubt that whoever registers the Japanese transliteration of such combination does so to unfairly take advantage of an existing site. Hence imo it's violation.
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The TM system is owner-policed. It's up to the TM owner to allege violation. It's not up to anyone else to decide.
The question of owning an English TM sentence and automatically receiving trademark protection in every other language used in the galaxy is going a bit too far, I think. Especially considering there could be 10 different chinese variants of it.
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When a website is very popular and has a very unique name, I think the name is a de-facto TM.
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Well, it's a name used in commerce and maybe a common law TM - as opposed to a registered TM.
Of course, the same phrase can have multiple TM owners - using the phrase in different areas of business - that's why TM systems have "classes".
There are two entities with a TM for "blah blah blah", another has "blah, blah, blah" and another has "blah blah blah!".
I have one guy try to muscle a descriptive domain from me, based on him having a TM. I checked - he had APPLIED for a TM, that's not the same as having a TM, especially since they rejected it later.
Finally, I'm not a lawyer, don't aspire to be one, don't play one on TV, and if you are having difficulties in this area you should make contact with one of the TM attorneys that frequent this forum.