Yesterday, Laura provided some good marketing reasons for grabbing your company's brand name(s) and/or trademark(s) on various social media sites while the marks and brands are still available. I am not a marketing professional, but I agree with everything that she has said, and I'm here to provide some "legal" reasons for grabbing your company's brand or mark in these spaces.

I use quotes around the "legal" reasons because not all of my proffered reasons are strictly legal. From a strictly legal standpoint, a company that intends to rely on its trademark rights to preserve its own space on various social networking sites may have no protection whatsoever. Painting with broad strokes, conventional trademark law often cannot reach the use of a domain name in an Internet address because such use is often not considered trademark use. Uniform Domain Name Resolution Proceedings (UDRP) and Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) actions are generally directed at cybersquatting and typosquatting of domain names, not path extensions in particular domain name spaces. (And I hasten to add that I have not researched this point. I would be curious to know if anyone is aware of an ACPA action against use of a mark in a URL path, as opposed to a domain name. Trademark types might review the definition of "domain name" in the Lanham Act under 15 USC 1127 and consider its import. The ACPA is at 15 USC 1125(d).) So much for "legal" remedies.