The use of sports teams’ logos on merchandise is another perceived David v. Goliath trademark issue, pitting the greedy team owners against the small businessman who merely wants to provide the fan with the opportunity to express his/her allegiance to his/her favorite team, with logo merchandise at popular prices.
Arsenal, not quite in…
I have been leaving the reporting of the drama over the re-delegation of the .za TLD (South Africa’s country-code) to Bret Fausett’s ICANN Blog. However I couldn’t resist mentioning this story that, to prevent a government take-over, the former administrator has hidden the “key” to the domain abroad. This is shaping up to be…
This is the kind of story that gets anti-IP folk riled up about those who “highjack” common terms, but remember, Pat Riley can only enforce the trademark THREEPEAT against people who use it as a trademark, not people like you and me who use THREEPEAT all the time to describe situations where we have won…
This STOP decision transferring paint.biz to complainant is another argument for appellate review of UDRPs and other domain name resolution proceedings. Complainant’s ITU trademark application for PAINT.BIZ was filed after the November ’00 announcement of the .biz TLD was announced. It apparently does use PAINT.BIZ as a trademark on the real world. We don’t know…
The brand owner’s dream is that if your brand is ACME, then the consumer can find you at ACME.COM. In otherwords, the brand is the navigator. In practice, the “dot com assumption” works effectively for only a small number of the world’s brands, but it raises the hopes of any business.
How can navigational systems help…
Good article from INTA on the protection of sound marks.
I thought link-blocking software was going to make these disputes go away, but the Danish newspaper guild is one of several entities accusing linkers of trademark infringement (and, more plausibly, unfair competition). In 1998 I wrote a paper entitled “Dismantling the Web With Trademark and Copyright Law.” The hypothesis was that the Web was anti-thetical…
In defending its policy to oppose hyperlinks (see story above), the managing director of a Danish newspaper organization stated: “We consider it unfair to base your business upon the works of others.”
This news story reports an Austrian supreme court decision stripping Sony of its trademark and holding that WALKMAN is generic for hand-held portable tape-players. The text of the decision is not yet available.
Question for discusion: If WALKMAN is generic in Austria, can I assemble them in Austria ans sell them into the rest of…
Registrant registered ralphlaurensheets.com and ralphlaurensheets.net. It warehoused the names. It did not respond to demand letters. It did not respond to the UDRP. And this panelist found that bad faith was not shown. This decision shows as much as anything else how screwed up the UDRP is.