Trademarks – Page 6 – Attorney Evan Brown

October 7, 2010 Trademarks

Personal name in web search results did not support Lanham Act claim

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 the results showed a false endorsement by her of the pornographic and pharmaceutical sites.

Yahoo moved to dismiss, arguing that plaintiff was without standing to challenge this use of her personal name under Section 43(a). The district court granted the motion. Plaintiff sought review with the Seventh Circuit. On appeal, the court affirmed.

It held that plaintiff had failed to show she had a commercial interest in her name. Such interests are the only ones protectible under Section 43(a). Attempting to overcome this hurdle, plaintiff urged the court to consider her online activities such as writing “scholarly articles” and some poetry to be commercial services.

The court rejected this argument, noting that while those goals may be passionate and well intentioned, they are not commercial. Absent commercial activity, plaintiff lacked standing under the Lanham Act.

Other coverage of this case:

May 12, 2010 Cybersquatting, Trademarks

Trademark holder not entitled to domain name registered years before

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 that have acquired a trademark registration wonder whether they can use their crisp new registration certificate to stomp out someone else who has been using a domain name similar to the company’s new mark.

A recent case arising under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP for short) shows us that the earlier domain name registration is usually going to be on solid ground against a later-arriving trademark owner.

In the case of Arizona State Trailer Sales, Inc. d/b/a Little Dealer Little Prices RV v. World Wide RV, a National Arbitration Forum panelist denied the trademark owner’s cybersquatting claim against another company who had registered the domain name version of the trademark in 2006.

To be successful under the UDRP, the complainant would have had to show:

the domain name registered by the respondent was identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainint had rights;
the respondent had no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
the domain name had been registered and was being used in bad faith.

The complaint failed on the first of these three elements. The panel found that the requirement of being identical or confusingly similiar “necessarily implies that Complainant’s rights must predate the registration of Registrant’s domain name.” Since the domain name in this case was registered years before, there was no relief to be had. The request to transfer the domain name was denied.

April 15, 2010 Cybersquatting, Trademarks, Uncategorized

UDRP loser did not commit fraud on USPTO by saying it was exclusive user of mark

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 obtained by fraud on the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Specifically, defendant argued that plaintiff misrepresented when it told the USPTO that its SKINSTORE mark had “acquired distinctiveness” (i.e., was not merely descriptive of the goods and servcies) by means of “substantially exclusive” use in commerce.

The court denied the motion for summary judgment.

Defendant had argued that plaintiff committed fraud by saying its use was exclusive. It pointed to a case under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) that the plaintiff had brought against the user of the domain name eskinstore.com. The WIPO panel in that case refused to find a clear case of cybersquatting.

In this case, defendant argued that plaintiff’s earlier unsuccessful UDRP challenge to a similar mark showed there were third parties using the mark and therefore the claim of exclusivity was fraudulent.

The court rejected this argument, noting that the plaintiff had undertaken significant efforts to protect its exclusive rights in the trademark. (It had sent out an astounding 300 cease and desist letters in the past couple of years alone!)

Moreover, and more importantly, the court noted that the WIPO panel hearing the UDRP complaint specifically declined to determine cybersquatting had occurred, finding it to be a question of infringement better addressed by the United States courts.

January 28, 2010 Trademarks

File extensions cannot be trademarks

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.

File types

Plaintiff Autodesk moved for summary judgment on the trademark issue. The defendant pointed out that the trademark laws do not permit one to claim exclusive rights in trademarks that are merely functional.

During the hearing on the motion, the court asked Autodesk’s counsel to disavow any claim to trademark protection for the letters “DWG” when used for the file extension. Counsel did disavow such claim but held onto Autodesk’s argument that the letters could serve as a word mark to be used on packaging and advertising and marketing materials.

The Court agreed and sided with Autodesk and included in its order language that expressly stated “anyone in the world is free to use .dwg as a file extension as far as Autodesk is concerned.”

Autodesk filed a motion and asked the court to reconsider its holding, arguing that what Autodesk really meant when it disavowed the claim of exclusive rights was that anyone else could use the extension so long as the use was being made with Autodesk’s proprietary technology, or was interoperable with that technology.

The court rejected this argument holding:

File extensions are functional, and functional uses cannot be trademarked. To rule otherwise would invite a clog on commerce, given the millions of software applications. The limited universe of extension permutations would soon be encumbered with claimants and squatters purporting to own exclusive rights to file extensions.

The court went on to say there would be no consumer confusion because,

[T]he primary purpose of a file extension is to tell the computer the type of the file it is handling. A computer is not a consumer. Its “reading” of the file extension is not in connection with a commercial transaction. It doesn’t care who made the file format it is trying to read.

This isn’t the first time the question of whether machine perception of information has been held to not give rise to trademark protection. An analogous situation is the 1-800 Contacts v. WhenU decision in which the Second Circuit held that WhenU did not “use” another company’s trademarks within the meaning of the Lanham Act when it included trademarked terms in an unpublished directory that triggered delivery of contextually relevant advertising.

December 9, 2009 Trademarks

Court denies motion to dismiss AdWords trademark infringement case

FragranceNet.com, Inc. v. Les Parfums, Inc., — F.Supp.2d —, 2009 WL 4609268 (E.D.N.Y. December 8, 2009)

FragranceNet.com sells perfume online. It sued several of its competitors, claiming trademark infringement and other causes of action like unfair competition and unjust enrichment, over the defendants’ alleged purchase of variations of the term “fragrancenet” to trigger sponsored links on Google results pages. These sponsored links allegedly drove traffic to defendants’ websites.

The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint. Had this case been filed a year ago, the defendants may have argued that the case should be dismissed because the purchase of keywords to trigger sponsored links was not “use” of the marks. But in light of the Rescuecom decision from this past spring, defendants were constrained to argue differently.

They claimed that the case should be dismissed because the purchased keywords are generic terms and therefore not protectible as trademarks. The court rejected this argument, holding that it was inappropriate to determine whether the marks are generic at the motion to dismiss stage because plaintiff had adequately stated plausible trademark claims in its complaint. The question of genericness is better considered with some actual facts.

Photo courtesy Flickr user hslo under this Creative Commons license.

March 10, 2009 Cybersquatting, Trademarks

Cybersquatter hit with maximum penalty

Citigroup, Inc. v. Shui, 2009 WL 483145 (E.D. Va. Feb. 24, 2009)

Court enjoins use of citybank.org, orders defendant to pay $100,000 in statutory damages and to pay Citibank’s attorneys’ fees.

Defendant Shui registered the domain name citybank.org and established a site there promoting financial services, sometimes using the mark CITIBANK. The real Citibank, armed with its trademark registrations in over 200 countries and over 50 years of use of its CITIBANK mark, filed suit against Shui under the Anticybersquatting and Consumer Protection Act, 15 USC 1125(d) (“ACPA”).

Citibank moved for summary judgment on its ACPA claim and also asked the court to enter an injunction against Shui. Citibank also sought $100,000 — the maximum amount of statutory damages available under the ACPA, plus payment of Citibank’s attorneys’ fees. The court granted all of Citibank’s requested relief.

To prevail on the ACPA claim, Citibank had to show that (1) Shui had a bad faith intent to profit from using the domain name, and (2) that the domain name at issue was identical or confusingly similar to, or dilutive of, Citibank’s distinctive or famous mark.

Finding of bad faith

The court found Shui registered the domain name in bad faith because:

Shui did not have any trademark or other intellectual property rights in the domain name, and the registration of the domain name was not sufficient to establish any rights.
The domain name consisted of the legal name of Citibank (with one letter difference) and not the legal name of, nor any name that was otherwise used to identify Shui.
Shui had not engaged in prior use of the disputed domain name in connection with the bona fide offering of any goods or services prior to registering the domain name.
Shui’s use of the domain name was commercial in nature. Notably, some of the advertisements on Shui’s site were exact replicas of the marks CITIBANK and CITI. Each clickthrough provided Shui with advertising revenue, even though clicking on a link with Citibank in the title did not redirect the user to any website affiliated with the real Citibank.
Shui clearly intended to confuse, mislead and divert internet traffic from Citibank’s official website to his own in order to garner more clickthrough revenue from the misleading “citibank” advertisements.
Subsequent to the filing of the complaint, Shui sold the domain name for financial gain to a third-party in an apparent effort to avoid liability.
Shui registered other internet domain names which were identical or similar to Citibank’s marks, and the CITIBANK mark was distinctive and famous at the time Defendant registered the disputed domain name.

Confusing similarity

On the issue of confusing similarity, the court observed the strength of Citibank’s mark and the fact that the parties both offered financial services. Taking those facts in combination with the bad faith demonstrated by Shui, the court found the disputed domain name to be confusingly similar to Citibank’s marks.

The remedy

Accordingly, the court found in favor of Citibank on the ACPA claim. The court was stern in its remedy. It found that Shui’s registration of the confusingly similar domain name was “sufficiently willful, deliberate, and performed in bad faith to merit the maximum statutory award of $100,000 and an award of attorney’s fees.”

$100K photo courtesy Flickr user Ricardo (Kadinho) Villela under this Creative Commons license.

February 6, 2009 Fraud/Misrepresentation, Trademarks

Trademark infringement and false designation claims not subject to heightened pleading standard

Court also foreshadows that if all they’re talking about is metatags, there won’t be much of a case.

Indiaweekly.com, LLC v. Nehaflix.com, Inc., 2009 WL 189867 (D. Conn. January 27, 2009)

In moving to dismiss claims brought against it for trademark infringement and false designation of origin under 15 U.S.C. Secs. 1114(1) and 1125(a), Indiaweekly.com, LLC claimed that the counterplaintiff Nehaflix.com had failed to allege sufficient facts to meet the standard of Fed. R. Civ. P. 9(b). That rule requires that “[i]n alleging fraud . . . a party must state with particularity the circumstances constituting fraud . . . .”

Bollywood mudflap

The U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut rejected Indiaweekly.com’s assertion that such claims were subject to Rule 9’s heightened pleading standard. Nehaflix.com’s allegations that Indiaweekly.com placed Nehaflix’s trademark on Indiaweekly.com to draw in search traffic survived the motion to dismiss. It was plausible that potential Nehaflix customers, when searching for the term “Nehaflix” would, upon being directed to another site containing the term and selling competing goods, conclude that the two businesses were related when in fact they were not.

It is important to note that the court assumed for the sake of the motion to dismiss that the allegations that the Nehaflix mark “appeared” on Indiaweekly.com meant that the mark was visible when viewing the site and not merely in metatags. The court nodded to S&L Vitamins v. Australian Gold, Inc., 521 F.Supp.2d 188 (E.D.N.Y. 2007), which held that mere metatag use was not “use in commerce” for purposes of the Lanham Act.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Meanest Indian under this Creative Commons license.

January 8, 2009 Cybersquatting, Trademarks

Verizon obtains damages, injunction against regsitrar under ACPA

[This is a guest post by contributor Brian Beckham]

Plaintiff Verizon California, Inc. (Verizon) recently obtained a default judgment in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, in its favor against Defendant, the registrar OnlineNIC, Inc. (press release).

Despite repeated attempts, Verizon was not able to serve notice on OnlineNIC; the court ultimately approved Verizon’s application to serve process with the California Secretary of State. OnlineNIC was alleged to have engaged in the bad faith registration of 663 identical or confusingly similar domain names incorporating one of Verizon’s family of marks (e.g., <bestverizon.net>, <myprepaidverizon.com>, <verizonflios.com>, <vzwactivate.com>, etc.) inter alia, in violation of the ACPA. Verizon’s unchallenged, well-pleaded allegations were accepted by the court as true; OnlineNIC’s liability was thus established.

In addition to OnlineNIC’s default, significantly, the court noted that OnlineNIC had refused to alter its behavior (presumably after a cease & desist letter) and had purposefully attempted to avoid detection (e.g., by providing false contact information). However, given the default, the court was reluctant to impose the full statutory damages provided for under the ACPA ($100,000 per infringement), but imposed damages of $50,000 per violation (totaling $33.15 million). It remains to be seen whether Verizon will successfully collect, nonetheless, Verizon obtained a transfer order in its favor for all of the 663 infringing domain names. OnlineNIC (including any related entity) was further enjoined from directly or indirectly (i) registering, trafficking in or using any domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to the Verizon marks and (ii) assisting, aiding or abetting any other person or business entity in engaging in or performing and of the said activities.

This injunction seems to leaves open the question of whether the seemingly common registrar practice of actively suggesting alternate domain names available for registration (e.g., those that add alphanumerical strings, e.g., <new____4u.com>, <buy____.net>, <your____.org>, <my____pro.com>, <best____.com>, etc.) would be covered by the “assisting, aiding or abetting” language in the injunction.

Case is: 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 104516

December 18, 2008 Trademarks

Disclaimer in trademark registration sinks UDRP action

Ideation Unlimited, Inc. v. Dan Myers, Case No. D2008-1441 (WIPO November 12, 2008).

A trademark owner who notices that someone else has registered a domain name incorporating the owner’s mark can file an arbitration action under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP for short). This often serves as a quicker and less expensive alternative to pursuing the cybersquatter in court.

To be successful under the UDRP, the “Complainant” has to show all of the following three elements:

(a) the registered domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trade mark or service mark in which the Complainant has rights; and

(b) the “Respondent” has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the disputed domain name; and

Ideation Unlimited, Inc. uses a logo with the word PRESCRIPTION COSMETICS. It has a United States and United Kingdom registrations for this logo. But in the U.S. registration the term “prescription cosmetics” is disclaimed. (Trademark applicants are required to “disclaim” any exclusive rights to use terms within their marks that are generic or merely describe the products.”) In the U.K. registration the word “prescription” is disclaimed.

The panel concluded that “[i]f the Complainant has willingly disclaimed any trade mark rights in the entire term ‘Prescription Cosmetics’, it cannot and should not claim to have trade mark rights in that term by virtue of its . . . registration.”

But what about common law rights, you ask? After all, one can support a UDRP action even without a trademark registration. The panel noted as follows:

Of course, it is not necessary for the Complainant to establish registered trade mark rights – it would be sufficient for the purposes of these proceedings under the Policy for the Complainant to demonstrate common law trade mark rights in the term PRESCRIPTION COSMETICS. However in the Complaint, the Complainant relies heavily on the three device marks, and provides little evidence of common law rights or reputation.

The decision underscores the importance of keeping trademark registrations up to date. Presumably, the mark in question here could have acquired distinctiveness by now (it’s been in use since the mid-70’s) so the disclaimer probably isn’t necessary anymore. And the decision also shows the importance of submitting evidence (at least a declaration) showing what common law or unregistered rights the complainant has.

November 17, 2008 Trademarks, Unfair Competition

Results of Internet searches helpful in earthworm trademark case

Cascade Mfg. Sales, Inc. v. Providnet Co. Trust, 2008 WL 4889716 (W.D. Wash. November 12, 2008)

Cascade Manufacturing makes and sells composting bins in which earthworms “enhance and accelerate the composting process.” Cascade owns a federal trademark registration for WORM FACTORY. It sued its competitor Providnet Co. for trademark infringement over Providnet’s use of the mark GUSANITO WORM FACTORY. Cascade moved for a preliminary injunction against Providnet’s use of its “worm factory” mark. The court granted the motion.

One of Providnet’s arguments against the injunction was that “worm factory” is a generic term for the types of products being sold under the respective marks. To refute this contention, Cascade introduced evidence of Internet searches supporting its claim that the products at issue are referred to as “worm bins,” and that “worm factory” refers to Cascade’s particular product. The court found this evidence to be instructive.

Earthworm picture courtesy Flickr user Rick Harris under this Creative Commons license. Redistributed here under the same license.