At 13:36 20/08/98 +1000, you wrote:
>The story is, so I was told, that when you register a company name, you
>obtain some rights to the use of that name, including names that sound
>like yours. The usual rule is that a name has to have two words that are
>different in order to be said to be unlike another. The problem is that
>when this rule applies to domain-name-as-company-names, there is only
>one word different (whatever's before the first dot).

IAMAL, but I'm pretty sure there's no rule about a business name having to
have two words unlike another. There are many businesses with only one
*letter* different to existing names that are allowed to be registered by
ASIC.

>If this was tested in court, it may well be proven that the first
>company to register *.com.au owned rights to any company name or RBN
>that had ".com.au" after it, due to it looking so similar. I think this
>means that Connect (their ACN is the earliest, and I'm guessing they are
>sequentially allocated) technically could sue the other 32 name holders,
>and maybe stop anyone trading as *.com.au.

For the reason above, I don't think this would be very unlikely to succeed.
Also, ACN's aren't necessarily allocated sequentially (although I suspect
Connect was probably first in any case).

What is perhaps more interesting is the very similar business names (and
domain names, in some cases) where different Australian companies have near
identical names but one is in .com.au and one in .com (or one is a com.au,
one is a .net.au). There are at least a handful like this in the same
industry as each other where has been mistaken for the other at times.
Whether anyone did this on purpose or not is hard to say, but the
possibility is certainly there, and legally this might be a much more
compelling argument.

The first case (*.com.au) is a bit like McDonalds Family Restaurants
compared to Smiths Family Restaurants, whereas the second is more like
McDonalds that sells hamburgers vs McDinalds than sells hamburgers.

JS