Visa vs. evisa.com In Vegas

wessman writes "In October 2002, Visa (the credit card company) convinced a Las Vegas federal court to prevent the small business JSL Corp. from using the term 'evisa' and the domain 'evisa.com' for its website offering travel, foreign language, and other multilingual applications and services. The court ruled that the website--run by Joe Orr from his apartment-- 'diluted' Visa's trademark, even though the site uses the word 'visa' in its ordinary dictionary definition, not in relation to credit card services. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping JSL with an appeal. The EFF has a press release available."

Comments

EFF is full of it here

[Anonymous Coward]

Visa is not suing JSL because their website "evisa.com" dilutes Visa's trademark. They are suing JSL because their website dilutes Visa's "e-visa.com" trademark. Which Visa owns. Visa owns the trademarks to both E-Visa and to eVisa. Neither of which is in the dictionary, thank you very much.

EFF should be spending its time on a more worthwhile lawsuit. They'll go down in flames on this one: Visa is dead right.

Re:EFF is full of it here

[EkiM in De]

From the Whois database
evisa.com : Record created on 27-Aug-1997
e-visa.com: Created on Wed, Apr 22, 1998

evisa.com had been registered just under a year when VISA registered their domain for eVisa (as a product)

A quick search of the US PTO database reveals that VISA did not register their trademark for eVisa and e-Visa until "August 19, 1999".

Though interestingly a search of the wayback machine shows an incarnation of the evisa website from oct 12 1999 (after the eVisa trademark was filed) as a webdesign and e-commerce company, with later additional web directory content. The wayback machine does not have any Visa (as an entry stamp) information as of Sep 25 2001 (its last entry for evisa.com)

Re:Well

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Hmmm. My first thought when I see "evisa.com" is "Oh, another made-up company name." (Avaya, Agilent, etc.) My first thought when I see "eVisa" (or, for that matter, "e-Visa") is "government program to allow people to apply for visas over the net." That it's private rather than government doesn't substantially change that interpretation. If I were looking for visa help, I'd be happy to find a company that could provide it.

And you know, like most Americans, I pay for a good half the shit I buy by credit card -- more like 90% if you count using my debit card as well -- and both my credit and debit cards say "Visa" on them. And yet that is waaay down on the list of things I think of.

I I want to contact Visa over the net, I'll go to visa.com, not evisa.com or e-visa.com or whatever. You wouldn't go to eford.com to look at cars, would you?