Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, case law, cybersquatting, typosquatting
24 Dec
Verizon issued a press release today that announced a record $33.5M cybersquatting judgment against OnlineNIC. There were 663 domains in question and the judge chose to award $50K per domain, presumably under the guidelines of the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act (ACPA), which allow a penalty of between $1K and $100K per domain. Very little is known [...]
ICANN had been planning on a radical transformation of the gTLD system in May 2009 that would result in a tremendous expansion of available gTLDs (current examples of gTLDs include .biz, .mobi, .com, .org). The proposal would basically allow anyone with $185K to buy a new gTLD (although technically those are application fees).
Large brands [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in case law, domains, typosquatting
19 Dec
In the Vulcan Golf vs. Google case, the judge recently denied a motion by the plaintiffs to turn the lawsuit into a class action. We’ve mentioned the lawsuit before, but the general gist is that the plaintiffs are alleging that Google and several other parties participate in trademark infringement by selling ads on infringing [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, BrandVerity, PoachMark, PoachMark Pool, case law, poaching
19 Dec
We’re excited to announce the launch of the PoachMark Pool – a collaborative approach to catching trademark poachers. It allows you to benefit from the discoveries of other members.
What is the PoachMark Pool?
The PoachMark Pool is a shared resource of search ads contributed by PoachMark customers. All of the data we retrieve about a particular [...]
We picked up these recent additions to several seasonal searches. This is a tradition that Google has been doing since 2005. We’ve found six already – let us know if you find any more.
Posted by David Naffziger in affiliate marketing, case law
03 Dec
Sarah Bird at SEOMoz put together an excellent summary of the DSW vs. Zappos case. DSW sued Zappos because one of Zappo’s affiliates created organic pages that targeted DSW terms, used DSW TMs in the domain names, used DSW images, but linked to Zappos pages (through CJ).
The initial Complaint was denied, however the judge gave [...]