another trademark question

[updatedsports]

If a really big company like espn owned the .com, .net ,.org. .us and .info but not the .ws and i picked up espn.ws and made a site called entertainment search path network and sold the domain name and site on ebay and put on the auction page: "Buyer agrees that I am not responsible for any trademark issues that may come up with this domain name." Could I get sued for this??

 

yes I would think so, as the disclaimer agreement should be with you and ESPN rather than you and the buyer. It would still be within Espn's rights to sue the old owner for trademark infringment that has occurred in the past. Also the tagline you use as example example could well be used against you as it suggests knowledge of potential trademark infringement, I wouldn't use it myself

I guess the buyer could agree to indemnify you for any future legal matters, but as a practical thing I doubt they would agree to that, and they may not have the resources later on anyhow to cover your fees.

Having said that the chance of them going after the old owner is probably very low, I can't say I've heard of it happening before.

 

[mole]

Well, getting back to the root of it all, tms do not accord automatic rights to a domain name with that trademark. If it did, we can all forget about buying domains since we will be sued for everything under the sun and have our names confiscated.

But if you were to register espn.ws and somehow showed bad faith that you intended to profit from the company's name, then you could well get that domain taken away from you.

It's all a question of bad faith. The very fact that you knew that espn was a tm'd company name, and you registered the .ws extension intentionally with that in mind, is already against you.