Godzilla Getting Ready to Stomp Mozilla?

mrBlond writes: "Doing the rounds: Seems like Toho [jp], 'the owner of all rights in and to the trademark and service mark GODZILLA [jp] and the GODZILLA characters,' is coming down on Davezilla for use of 'zilla' in his domain name and his dragon logo, to set a precedent before attacking Mozilla."

Comments

What ever happened to "tradespace"?

[dschuetz]

Okay, I'll grant you that calling something ".+zilla" and using a dinosaur/dragon-like logo is probably coming close to violating a Godzilla trademark.

But what ever happened to the concept of a restricted space within which trademarks are (were?) supposed to operate? I had understood that trademarks were only protected within the same general "realm" of a product -- which is how we've got Excel cars and Excel spreadsheets.

It's seemed to me, with the advent of the modern internet, that all these distinctions have been thrown away, and that the courts are allowing that diminished distinction. So Palm has to stop calling their Pilot a "Pilot" because a pen company complains.

Does anyone know what exactly is the deal here? Have domain-name disputes finally opened the door for a single, universal, all-encompasing product namespace?

If someone wants to call their browser Mozilla (or even Godzilla), then they should be able to, because the chances of someone confusing a web browser with a big lizard are pretty darned slim.

Or have I misunderstood this aspect of (US) trademark law all along?

It's Gojira nimnertz !!!!

[gelfling]

The character and the movie is GOJIRA.

God-zilla is an American Eenglish bastardization. They should at least after the right fucking phoneme.

how rame.

Mozilla was first, I think

[Ironica]

While Toho first trademarked the Godzilla word mark in 1981, they did not hold a trademark on its use in computer software until October of 1994. Mozilla started in "mid-1994" from the best info I've been able to find. I seem to remember someone showing it to me in the spring of that year, though that might have been Mosaic. Neither their first trademark nor the software one have any illustrations or descriptions of a lizard-like monster creature, though; that does not appear to be a part of the trademark. Their most comprehensive trademark was registered in 2000, presumably with the launch of the Sony movie. That one *still* doesn't describe godzilla though.

I'm no trademark attorney, but I'm guessing that, since they're not claiming in the trademark registration that the mark consists of the word + the monster, they don't have a leg to stand on with *zilla claims. Also, it doesn't appear they stopped Bugzilla (the cleaning agent, not the software) from registering its trademark in 2000. Milton Bradley has also owned a trademark on Eggzilla since 1987.

All in all, they have a lot of fish to fry if they're going to try to reserve *zilla as their own, including multiple existing or pending trademarks. (Budzilla, Rodzilla, and Speedzilla are all currently published for opposition.)

I love the Trademark Electronic Search System...