There are multiple reasons that you should talk to a lawyer before going ahead with this, not least the cease-and-desist letter you are sooner or later going to receive from Paypal complaining about infringement of their trademark.
The test is whether or not the use of Pal is likely to cause confusion for the goods and services that the trademark was registered for. If this was a service to help you adopt a new puppy, there's little likelihood of confusion. However, if your company has "Pal" in the name and the explicit intent of the company is to provide financial services just like PayPal does, then yeah... you're going to get hammered. It's basically raising a giant middle finger towards both Stripe and PayPal.
Err, I certainly didn't mean to be raising any middle fingers. I've just always thought it was weird Stripe doesn't have a lightweight payment page, considering how simple it was to build this with Stripe Checkout and their automatic email receipts.
I've been sitting on this idea for almost three years, and with time it got so easy to build that I finally took a few weekends out. Here's a post from back when I'd have to build out the checkout experience and receipts myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4507050
I'll have to look deeper into this trademark issue though. Anyone have any alternative name ideas?
If the names are similar and they are in the same industry/sector -- so that the typical consumer might confuse them -- then yes that absolutely can and does get attacked as a trademark infringement.
See Facebook versus Teachbook cough I mean Teachquest.
Or Microsoft versus Lindows cough I mean Linspire.
