Articles For Week 7
Thad's House sues Self-Help Center
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2008/03/14/news/casper/cccb5406a70d5a688725740b007c7cf5.txt
Trouble comes from two self-help centers as one branches off, but continues to use a trademarked name to promote itself. the Self-Help Center works to councel female victoms of domestic violence. They made a seperate service called Thad's House to helpd with the male side as well. The company changed it's name to McKinley House, but still advertised under that name. THe plaintiff said that damages had been done because people were getting confused between the two entities, although Self-Help Center claims that all calls that were made for Thad's House were directed there and that they didn't know they had a trademark.
This relates to our case studies and readings. Although there has not been a ruling on this case yet, I think it is likely that they will be found to be infringing regardless of what they did after they got the call. The initial misdirection may be enough for one group to steal the sales of another.
http://www.juriscom.net/actu/visu.php?ID=1025
http://www.juriscom.net/actu/visu.php?ID=1025
Brad Spitz writes about De Dietrich, Electrolux, and others v. Google France and Google Inc. "The plaintiffs argued that the "Adwords" system infringes on their trademarks as it uses a keyword generator and broadcasts advertisements that may lead the public to believe that the advertisers are related to the companies who own the trademarks. Moreover, they claimed that the Google companies infringed on their rights to their corporate names and their domain names, and committed acts of misleading advertising by using ‘commercial links’ and carrying out classifications of the trademarks that lead consumers to misrepresent the relationships that the companies may have with the sites of the advertisers who use their trademarks illegally." The judgement that was dismissed by the High Court was brought before the Court of Appeal and they found that Google most definately infringed on French Intellectual Property law by reproducing verbatim trademarks that led users astray through advertisements.
This case relates to the american version that we read in class where search engines advertisements led users to playboy sites that perhaps wern't actually run by playboy.
War of the Words: Trouble may be in store for online Scrabulous game
http://thedaily.washington.edu/2008/3/13/war-words/
Erica Cederlind writes about Scrabaulous, an online version of scrabble that shares the same rules, same playstyle, same board, even the same dictionary by which scrabble determines which words are legal. Scrabaulous, however, is not part of Hasbro and Mattel. 3 million users play the online game, its popularity skyrocketing as Facebook adopted it as an application. Its creators, the Agarwallas, now gain 25,000 dollars a month through site advertising. Hasbro has said that it is working on its own online version of the game although the brothers both admit that their product infringes on trademarks, Hasbro says that it has no intention of forcing the brothers to take the game down after a stream of complaints came in after an initial threat to sue their pants off. Many users belive that the online game actually helps promote sales of Hasbro's boardgame.
Sometimes enforcing your rights might be more costly than not due to negitive public relations. Hasbro is a bit of an odd man out in a world that is desperate to sue itself for infringements of any kind. Though they were going to use the brothers, it looks like instead there will be a settlement.