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For those in the know companies spend hundreds of thousands on trademark research with companies such as Namprotect and Thomson and Thomson who make millions from clients who research Trademarks, Service Marks, and Copyrights years (sometimes minutes) before they even plan on utilizing the mark. So that they can avoid situations like this.

Now who really wants to bet that Apple did not do their due diligence by using a trademark research firm?

I figure its NPBot or a variant. This one used to show up in the log files every now and then. Hit the link for the user agent info.

I point everyone to NameProtect. Their NPBot hit my page a couple of times before I told it not to. Basically, it scours your website and looks for songs. It then collects the links (not the music) and tries to get a bounty from the artist (?) by showing you that someone is sharing their music. It's other business model is that it can be contracted to find your music on websites.

from robots.txt:

User-agent: NPBot
Disallow: /

I point everyone to NameProtect. Their NPBot hit my page a couple of times before I told it not to. Basically, it scours your website and looks for songs. It then collects the links (not the music) and tries to get a bounty from the artist (?) by showing you that someone is sharing their music. It's other business model is that it can be contracted to find your music on websites.

from robots.txt:

User-agent: NPBot
Disallow: /

For example I noticed something in my logs for a bot (NPBot) from the people at NameProtect.

I have nothing to hide but seeing as the server in question is running over my ADSL link I have nothing to gain and no particular desire to have them crawling the site either so I plonked them in the robots.txt file and the crawler obeys it.

I do wonder if this raises some sort of red flag though as the bot seems to check the robots.txt file every day now as if it's gagging to be let in (of course if they really wanted to they could crawl it anyway).

For example I noticed something in my logs for a bot (NPBot) from the people at NameProtect.

I have nothing to hide but seeing as the server in question is running over my ADSL link I have nothing to gain and no particular desire to have them crawling the site either so I plonked them in the robots.txt file and the crawler obeys it.

I do wonder if this raises some sort of red flag though as the bot seems to check the robots.txt file every day now as if it's gagging to be let in (of course if they really wanted to they could crawl it anyway).

Just a word of warning, McBaby is a registered trademark. I wouldn't want anyone getting sued.

I suggest "sKetcher".

Bzzzzzt! Nope. Sketcher is a registered trademark of Fractal Design corp. if I recall correctly (or whoever bought them out). It's a raster graphics product, not vector, but it's sufficiently similar to qualify as trademark dilution.

I suggest "sKetcher".

Bzzzzzt! Nope. Sketcher is a registered trademark of Fractal Design corp. if I recall correctly (or whoever bought them out). It's a raster graphics product, not vector, but it's sufficiently similar to qualify as trademark dilution.

I suggest "sKetcher".

Bzzzzzt! Nope. Sketcher is a registered trademark of Fractal Design corp. if I recall correctly (or whoever bought them out). It's a raster graphics product, not vector, but it's sufficiently similar to qualify as trademark dilution.

Check out http://www.nameprotect.com. It costs $35 to do a search on their databases. I tried it out yesterday, and it seemed to work fine. However, it doesn't search state trademarks (although I don't know the status of these under the new laws).