Davina Lee at Bird & Bird in Hong Kong writes to advise that Intellectual Property Department has made available online trademark search of the Hong Kong registry.  Right now you can search by mark, soon you will be able to search by regsitrant as well.  I used PIKACHU as a test and it displays…

Last week Ben Edelman released his report on typo-squatting  (for example the registration of geapliances.com in order, imho, to divert traffic intended for geappliances.com, to a porno site).

Today’s ICANNWatch and Friday’s Copyfight linked to a paper from Seth Finkelstein, describing a program for “fuzzy-searching” of domain names, somewhat remiscent of Google’s “Did you mean…

Usually denials of cert in trademark cases get next to no coverage.  The denial of cert in the BARBIE GIRL case has gotten an astounding amount of ink (and pixels).  Here’s the latest, a parody article from MSNBC.

The BARBIE GIRL case illustrates one peril in going after a perceived “tarnishment” of a property…

The Fourth Circuit tells us:

Generally speaking, chemical crabgrass control products are most effective when applied to “pre-emergent” crabgrass . . . the products are also effective on early “post-emergent” crabgrass but are ineffective when applied to mature crabgrass plants . . .   Scotts [plaintiff] contends that the Vigoro [defendant] package misleads consumers into believing

…

OK, I need to replace my office fax and copier.  Do you guys have any recommendations? Email marty@schwimmerlegal.com.

The latest report from Ben Edelman, entitled “Large-Scale Registrations of Domains with Typographicl Errors.”  The author’s abstract:

The author reports more than five thousand domains that consist of minor variations on the addresses of well-known web sites, reflecting typographical errors often made by Internet users manually typing these addresses into their web browsers.

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Motley Fool suggests that if Philip Morris’ name change to Altria succeeds in diverting attention to its tobacco suit exposure, AOL TIME WARNER will change its name to WHEN I SNAP MY FINGERS YOU WILL FORGET THE MERGER EVER HAPPENED.

Imaginarium is a sub of Toys R Us.  It sells the kind of educational toys I wish my kids would like, instead of Transformers.  In addition to stores it has a website at imaginarium.com, which re-directs to an Amazon site, per a marketing arragnement.  Step Two is a Spanish company which has a sub…