(1) Pursuant to Title 30, chapter 13, MCA, and Title 35, chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, and 12, MCA, "distinguishable on the record" and "distinguishable in the records" means that a registered business name must be sufficiently distinctive from another registered business name so that it does not cause confusion in an absolute or linguistic sense.

(2) Business names that contain key words that are different and do not copy a business name already on record are "distinguishable." For example, "Bill's Carpentry" is distinguishable from "Bill's Builders."

(3) Geographic and numeric designations, phonetic similarities, and abbreviations of words (other than business identifiers) will make business names "distinguishable." For example, "Two for One Diner's Club" is distinguishable from "241 Diner's Club."

(4) The following conditions will not make a registered business name distinguishable:

(a) the use of punctuation marks or special characters, for example: "R/D Construction" and "R D Construction" are not distinguishable;

(b) the use of articles "a," "an," or "the," for example: "The Painted Pony" and "Painted Pony" are not distinguishable;

(c) the use of business name identifiers or their abbreviations, for example: "ABC Inc.," ''ABC Co.," and "ABC Corp." are not distinguishable;

(d) the substitution of an arabic numeral for a word, for example: "2" and "Two" are not distinguishable;

(e) the substitution of a lower case letter for a capital letter, for example: "d" and "D" are not distinguishable;

(f) the use of plurals, possessives, or tense, for example: plurals--"Fine Line Inc." and "Fine Lines Inc." are not distinguishable; possessives--"Employee Services" and "Employees' Services" are not distinguishable; and tense--"Swim Inc.," "Swimming Inc.," "Swims Inc.," and "Swam Inc." are not distinguishable; and

(g) the use of internet domain suffixes, for example: .com,.org, and .net are not distinguishable.