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Ford vs. 2600 Judge Upholds Right To Link
AnimeFreak writes: "According to this 2600 article, 2600 has won the right to link to Ford's website after Ford sued them for doing so. Ford had asserted that hyperlinking to their website or referring to it in DNS records constituted a variety of trademark violations. Judge Cleland rejected Ford's twisted interpretation of the trademark act, which claimed that by disparaging Ford's mark and preventing it from 'fully exploiting the value of its mark,'" 2600 was in violation of trademark law by redirecting a possibly offensive domain to Ford's site. We've mentioned this before, and it's nice to see a ruling in favor of linking. Thanks to Phalse Phace, here's a link to the 11-page decision.
This completely contradicts the judgement in the DeCSS case. 2600 only linked to the site to get the code..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seriously, to register a derogatory domain name and point it to someone else's webpage is effectively slander. Ford did not want its image associated with a profane domain name because that would hurt sales, and they were right to do so. When the average person typed fuckgeneralmotors.com and Ford's website popped up, they would have assumed that the domain name was registered by Ford, and hence, that Ford supported the use of profanity. Thus, doing so effectively disparaged the Ford name by association with what some would consider objectionable language.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
When will they learn that if someone is linking to their site, they can determine that through the HTTP Referer header and stick in some logic to do some of their own redirection or change the dynamic content. They can surely make the link as ineffective as if the original page had made an error in the link and put in the wrong domain. Or are corporate suits just too dumb to realize they can control something like their own web site?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sorry.. Trademark law requires 'resonableness' on the part of the public. Trademark law was *not* created in order to prevent slander.
Also..'fuckgeneralmotors' is not slander. 'Scientologysucks' COULD be slander, depending on if it's opinion or fact (hey.. it DOES suck.. but that's another story).
Trademark is not there to 'prevent your name from being associated with objectionable language'. It's there to prevent others from benefiting from the use of your mark, period, or from otherwise 'diluting' your mark.
Oh.. and please note.. the only mark in dispute here is the hyperlink to 'ford.com'. THey are NOT EVEN USING THE TRADEMARK ON THE SITE. The domain name is not what's in dispute... Ford was trying to say that using the word 'ford' in the hyperlink, because it came from a site called 'fuckgeneralmotors.com' was diluting the value of their mark.
And the judge called bullshit.
This is not a slander case. It's a trademark case.
Nonsense. If Ford were just pissed they could've blocked access to their site from fuckgeneralmotors.com. Would've taken 2 minutes if they were slow. Instead they reach for the lawyers. They're not concerned about their trademark, they were trying to establish a precedent they could use to intimidate others.