Choosing a plainly descriptive business name feels like the safe option. It rarely is. In 2013, a small Melbourne pool servicing company settled on “Pro Pool Services”, checked the ASIC and ABN registers, had its accountant confirm the name was available, and got on with business. This week, in The Pops Group Pty Ltd v Pro Pool Services Pty Ltd (No 2) [2026] FCA 912, the Federal Court found that “Pro Pool” is deceptively similar to the registered POOL PRO marks, granted a permanent injunction and ordered $60,000 in damages. Three findings deserve your attention. Reversing the word order didn’t help: consumers with an imperfect recollection remember the words and the idea, not the sequence. The infringements weren’t the full company name at all — they were the everyday abbreviations: the propool.com.au domain, “Pro Pools” on the website, a #propools hashtag, “Pro Pool Shop” signage. And the good faith defence failed because searching the company and business name registers is not searching the trade marks register — the Court held the law reasonably expects anyone adopting a name to check the register “of which they are taken to be aware”, or get advice. Ignorance is not good faith.

Business name vs trade mark: the lessons for your brand

The durable lessons run in both directions. If you are naming or renaming anything — a company, a product, a location — a trade mark search comes before the domain purchase and the signage, because business name registration gives you no right to use the name, only the right to be registered under it; that trap is a cousin of the timing problem in You Can’t Backdate Honesty, where good faith is judged at the moment of adoption and can’t be repaired later. Then audit how your teams actually use the brand: domains, email addresses, hashtags and shop signage are all trade mark use, and a shortened or tweaked version of your name earns no protection of its own — the same lesson as When a Suffix Isn’t a Shield. The checklist for a clean adoption sits in Preparing for a new launch. For trade mark owners, note what made enforcement straightforward here: Pool Pro had registered marks and a documented licensing program with a $10,000 annual fee, which the Court adopted as the damages yardstick — while the owner’s inflated expert report claiming lost product profits was rejected outright. A registered mark plus a real, priced licensing structure turns infringement into a calculable claim rather than an argument. The register is public and the search is cheap. The time to run it is before the vehicles are wrapped — for either side of this dispute, everything after that gets more expensive.