Patent trolls, open source, do not track, SOPA, PIPA and much, much more: Facebook’s IPO filing has a real zoo of issues. The securities laws require that companies going public identify risk factors that could adversely affect the company’s stock. Facebook’s S-1 filing, which it sent to the SEC today, identified almost 40 such factors. [...]
Archive for the ‘Trademarks’ Category
Use of trademark in gripe site subdomain was not likely to cause confusion
December 20th, 2011
Comments Off
Ascentive, LLC v. Opinion Corp., 2001 WL 6181452 (E.D.N.Y. December 13, 2011) Plaintiffs sued gripe site pissedconsumer.com for trademark infringement and other forms of unfair competition. The court denied plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction. It found, among other things, that defendants’ use of plaintiffs’ trademarks as subdomains (e.g., ascentive.pissedconsumer.com) was not likely to cause confusion. [...]
Court allows discovery of competitor’s keyword purchases
June 11th, 2011
Comments Off
Scooter Store, Inc. v. Spinlife.com, LLC, 2011 WL 2160462 (S.D. Ohio June 1, 2011) The Scooter Store and a related company sued a competitor for trademark infringement and other causes of action for unfair competition based in part on the competitor’s purchase of keywords such as “scooter store” and “your scooter store” to trigger sponsored [...]
Personal name in web search results did not support Lanham Act claim
October 7th, 2010
2 Comments
Stayart v. Yahoo, — F.3d —, 2010 WL 3785147 (September 30, 2010) Plaintiff performed a vanity search of her own name on Yahoo and found some results on porn and pharmaceutical sites. When Yahoo would not remove the search results upon plaintiff’s request, plaintiff sued under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act. She claimed that [...]
Trademark holder not entitled to domain name registered years before
May 12th, 2010
Comments Off
Arizona State Trailer Sales, Inc. d/b/a Little Dealer Little Prices RV v. World Wide RV, No. FA1003001315658 (Nat’l Arb. Forum, May 7, 2010) Startups in the process of selecting a company or product name are often frustrated to see that someone else, years ago, registered the .com version of their newly thought-of name. Similarly, companies [...]
UDRP loser did not commit fraud on USPTO by saying it was exclusive user of mark
April 15th, 2010
1 Comment
Salu, Inc. v. Original Skin Store, Slip Copy, 2010 WL 1444617 (E.D.Cal. April 12, 2010) This is kind of a wonky trademark/domain name case. So if that’s not in your wheelhouse, don’t strain yourself. Plaintiff sued defendant for infringement of plaintiff’s registered trademark. Defendant moved for summary judgment, claiming that the asserted trademark registration was [...]
File extensions cannot be trademarks
January 28th, 2010
3 Comments
Autodesk, Inc. v. Dassault Systemes Solidworks Corp., 2009 WL 5218009 (N.D. Cal. December 31, 2009) One of the issues in the case of Autodesk, Inc. v. Dassault Systemes Solidworks was whether Autodesk could claim trademark rights and the letters “DWG”. The .dwg (“drawing”) file extension is the native file format for Autodesk’s flagship product AutoCAD. [...]
