The USPTO, among others, suggested that allowing Booking.com to claim the trademark would harm other travel companies with the word “booking” in their domain names. Federal trademark law defines generic terms as those that don’t make a service or product distinct from other ones. It prevents companies from staking an exclusive claim to commonly used words such as “tailor” or “laundromat” in store names.

Booking.com claimed that people associate its brand with reservations and that denying its trademark application could lead to consumers becoming misled. In writing the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with the company, suggesting that public perception of a name is the core issue. 

“[If] Booking.com were generic, we might expect consumers to understand Travelocity — another such service — to be a Booking.com,” Ginsburg wrote. “We might similarly expect that a consumer, searching for a trusted source of online hotel-reservation services, could ask a frequent traveler to name her favorite Booking.com provider.”

“Because Booking.com is not a generic name to consumers, it is not generic,” Ginsburg determined. The court ruled 8-1 in favor of Booking.com, with Justice Stephen Breyer dissenting. The decision paves the way for other companies with generic terms in their domain names to trademark them.

The case was the first one for which the court used a teleconference system for oral arguments, with justices working remotely due to COVID-19 prevention measures. Those arguments were also the court’s first to be livestreamed.

PayPal, eBay, Mastercard, Visa and Stripe were some the most prominent companies to pull out, each of them leaving within days of each other.

Not that Facebook is deterred. Libra Association policy head Dante Disparte told Reuters that the departures were a “correction” and “not a setback.” The outfit also touted the number of potential members that could fill the exiting partners’ shoes, noting that about 180 entities met the initial membership requirements.

The formalization suggests the Association should be more stable going forward, and the remaining 21 members still have considerable clout. Nonetheless, this probably isn’t how Facebook envisioned progress on Libra — and this is before it faces some of its fiercest government scrutiny.

According to Huawei users on Twitter, ads for the hotel reservation site Booking.com are popping up on the lock screen of some Huawei smartphones. As Android Police reports, the ads seem to appear on devices using the preinstalled landscape wallpapers. They’ve been spotted in several countries — including the UK, Netherlands, Ireland, South Africa, Norway and Germany — and on various models.