I'm working on a startup with 3 of my friends on our spare time during school, and we're getting ready to launch within a couple months. We own the .net for our name, and we have the guy who owns the .com willing to sell that us (he's parking it with ads). However, he wants literally two orders of magnitude what we've spent on the company in total, so right now it seems like a waste of money we don't have (student budget) seeing as people just Google everything these days. My buddies want to buy the .com domain now but to me it seems unnecessary. Opinions?
Also, there is another group using the .fm of our name to make a somewhat similar product. We're not worried about them as a competitor, but I personally am wary that they might try to screw us out of the name legally, by registering for a trademark. I honestly don't know how trademarks work. Is an unregistered trademark that was used in commerce legally defensible? Could they even register the trademark with the government if we are also using the name? Honestly their product probably won't last but I'm afraid of getting legally trolled by them.
I don't want to say what the name is but we're not changing it, it's absolutely perfect.