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Owner of the Word Stealth 'Protecting' Rights
popo writes "Just when you thought ownership of intellectual property couldn't get any more absurd: The New York Times is reporting that the word 'Stealth' is being vigorously protected *in all uses* by a man who claims to exclusively own its rights. Not only has he gone head to head with Northrop Grumman, he has pursued it vigorously in the courts and has even managed to shut down "stealthisemail.com" (Steal This Email.com) because the URL coincidentally contains the word "stealth". What's terrifying is that he's gotten as far as he has."
Does this mean we have to change the C&C "stealth" tank to "unobtrusive and hard to see" tank"?
I'm pretty sure that's what the Northrop Grumman reference was to.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
Dodge this, scumbag.
Talk about prior art. The word has existed since 1250.
nil
RTFA, he got them back out of calling it a "stealth bomber" in all sorts of commercial materials.
According to TFA, the guy owns a brand named "Stealth," and he's essentially doing this to prevent other people from making brands similarly named.
...but is it art?
Columbia Pictures as well. That may have been a mistake, see HERE
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This guy came after our production company Deep Stealth Productions a couple of years ago. It was a thick sheaf of papers, which I dismissed after reading about another small company who had received his form threat. Might have to blow the dust off the thing.
Evil sig is livE.
He Says He Owns the Word 'Stealth' (Actually, He Claims 'Chutzpah,' Too)
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Can a man own a word? And can he sue to keep other people from using it?
Over the last few years, Leo Stoller has written dozens of letters to companies and organizations and individuals stating that he owns the trademark to "stealth." He has threatened to sue people who have used the word without his permission. In some cases, he has offered to drop objections in exchange for thousands of dollars. And in a few of those instances, people or companies have paid up.
"If a trademark owner doesn't go up to the plate each day and police his mark, he will be overrun by third-party infringers," Mr. Stoller, a 59-year-old entrepreneur, said in a telephone interview from his office in Chicago. "We sue a lot of companies."
Mr. Stoller owns and runs a company called Rentamark.com, which offers, among other things, advice on sending cease-and-desist letters and Mr. Stoller's services as an expert witness in trademark trials. Through Rentamark, Mr. Stoller offers licensing agreements for other words he says he owns and controls, such as bootlegger, hoax and chutzpah, and sells t-shirts and other merchandise through what the Web site calls its "stealth mall."
He is currently in a legal dispute with Sony's Columbia Pictures unit over a film that opens late this month. It is about elite Navy pilots and titled - what else? - "Stealth."
Mr. Stoller said he first registered "stealth" as a trademark in 1985 to cover an array of sporting goods. But in recent years, "stealth" has become widely used in marketing and branding circles to bestow a sense of the subliminal or the subversive or to convey an aura of lurking power.
Companies including the retailer Kmart and the consumer electronics maker JVC have stumbled into Mr. Stoller's territory and have removed "stealth" from their Web sites after hearing from him. Another electronics maker, Panasonic, omitted the word from a product called the "stealth wired remote zoom/pause control" after receiving one of Mr. Stoller's letters.
"If you can solve problems without going to court you're better off," said Russell J. Rotter, a lawyer for Panasonic, a division of Matsushita.
The best-known stealth brand may be the military's B2 stealth bomber, whose main contractor, Northrop Grumman, has fought Mr. Stoller to something of standoff. In 2001, the company paid Mr. Stoller $10 and agreed to abandon its trademark applications to use "stealth bomber" in spinoff products like model airplanes and video games. In return, Mr. Stoller agreed not to oppose Northrop's use of "stealth" in aircraft or defense equipment.
"We resolved it in a way that achieved our business purposes without in any way agreeing that Mr. Stoller's assertions were correct," said Tom Henson, a Northrop Grumman spokesman.
Trademark owners can obtain the right to use a word for commercial purposes and then to prevent others from seeking to use the same word for similar commercial purposes. For instance, the Delta Faucet Company, which has trademarked "Delta," could prevent another faucet company from adopting the name. But it cannot object to Delta Airlines because the two companies' products are not likely to be confused with one another.
A search of United States Patent and Trademark Office records found that Mr. Stoller and companies that share a Chicago post office box with him - Central Mfg., Stealth Industries, and S. Industries - hold at least two dozen registered trademarks for "stealth," covering such diverse products and services as crossbows, pool cues and insurance consultations.
Mr. Stoller said that he also held and administered as many as two dozen other "stealth" trademarks, and insisted that his close association with the word gave him special rights.
"We're entitled to own it with all goods and services," he said. "We were there first."
Some companies do recognize his rights to some uses of the word. Easton Spo
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
What's terrifying is that he's gotten as far as he has.
Not really, I'd just have to say that he's been very furtive and sneaky about it, indeed, he's acted quite surreptitiously about the whole thing.
(From TFA) In 2002, the Illinois attorney general sued Leo Stoller after he used a Web site to solicit donations illegally on behalf of victims of the destruction of the World Trade Center.
No, this guy's not a total fucking scumbag...
Omit the registering and the lawsuit, and I might be interested.
Would it be unconstitutional if Congress made a law to... you know... just smack this guy with a rolled-up newspaper or something?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
for stuff like this.
Someone who's this greedy, self-centered and determined to make a mess of everyone's life, liberty and property for his own advancement would discretely get his ass kicked one day on his way home from work. Seriously, the courts are too civilized of a way of dealing with things like this sometimes. Not that I'd recommend doing it to him, but there was a long period in our history where being this much of a troll got your ass tore up by a few "concerned citizens" for wasting tax payers' money with frivilous cases that were all about greed and nothing about justice.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Stealth in action!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The most telling sentence in the article:
For all his time in federal courtrooms - Mr. Stoller says his companies have been in court 60 times - there is no record within the Lexis database of a federal court decision on "stealth" in his favor.
In other words, the man is a litigious idiot. The fact that he's occasionally managed to get people to license from him says more about the fact that people are terrified of lawsuits than that the law itself is unfair.
People are terrified of the law. I know I am; at any moment I could be sued and even if I win, it'll cost me thousands, with no way to recapture it. (And before a bunch of non-lawyers start demanding "loser pays", remember that "loser pays" just introduces other unfairnesses when the poor can't sue the rich.)
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think. Anybody who's actually studied law knows that actual human interactions are full of corner cases, and ass-coverings easily outweigh the meat of most contracts.
If there were no litigious idiots, the law would be a lot simpler. Just like email would be lovely if there weren't a mountain of fools who think that "free" means "mine mine mine". Sadly, neither is the case. The courts are another commons, like email, and this jackass is ensuring that no commons it without its tragedy.
Fucktard.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... I'm the owner of PenIsland.com (Get your free pen from us) and I've received a few legal threats from several homosexually-oriented pornography websites (the url's of which I am not of liberty to disclose). This is an outrage, clearly all I am trying to do is provide the world with a service of free pens.
(In case you didn't realise, I don't own the domain and this post was a joke >.>)
Let the commencement BEGINULATE!
Good thing I have a lithp, tho you can't come after me, Mr. Thmarty Panth
My UID is prime... is yours?
Not only has he gone head to head with Northrop Grumman, he has pursued it vigorously in the courts and has even managed to shut down "stealthisemail.com" (Steal This Email.com) because the URL coincidentally contains the word "stealth".
What the article actually says about "Stealthisemail.com" is that Mr. Stroller sent an e-mail to the website telling them to shut it down. Then the article says about InterActivist Network (who runs stealthisemail.com):
Eric Goldhagen, a member of the InterActivist Network, said that members of his group planned to talk to lawyers and others who have received letters from Mr. Stoller to discuss ways to deal with his "stealth" claims. "The fact that somebody, just by claiming to own a word, can intimidate large companies and powerful law firms shows the damage, to an extent, is already done," he said. "If people like Stoller are allowed to get away with this unchallenged, there could be ripple effects to every form of public mass media."
which if you look closely seems to imply to me that they have not taken it to court yet, therefore have not been forced to shutdown. This is easily verified by going to the actual website which is still up.
Though I do agree with the general sentiment of the submitter that this whole thing is ridiculous. -Patrick
Otherwise you'd have people patenting words like "the" and "it"...
Aaaaugh! Aaaugh! Augh! Ohh! Don't say that word!
My site
The law in this case defies easy summary, but the gist is that when you get a trademark, you're really getting the right not to have confusingly similar things taking your business. The definition of "confusingly similar" is vague, and depends on a few zillion common law cases.
So when he applied "stealth" to sporting goods, it meant you couldn't come out with similar products with similar names. Again, "similar" is up to courts to decide. If you've got "stealth" bowling balls, are "stealth" skis too close? What about golf balls?
Clearly it doesn't apply to airplanes, and honestly I don't know why Northrop didn't just invite him to court. Except that court is expensive, even when you win, and the fact that they paid him $10 is a lot less than the retainer on their lawyers. It's disgusting, I know.
I don't know why they ceded any rights to him at all without knowing more facts about the case. They imply that they weren't seeking their own trademarks, but may have continued to use the name. But a news article isn't a legal brief, so it's hard to tell.
So to answer your question: the word "stealth" has been around forever, but trademarks don't apply only to made-up words. You can take a common word and trademark it for your application, which allows you to keep other people from muscling in on your good idea by confusing people with a similarly-named product. It's the sort of thing that would be accomplished by politeness if you could depend on that. For everything else, there are lawyers.
Yes, it's unconstitutional. That would be a bill of attainder, which is explicitly forbidden.
"how can he get the rights for a word that is in PUBLIC DOMAIN?"
In the same way that the names "Tide" and "Crest" are trademarked. Next time you're at the supermarket, take note of how many products take their names from words in the dictionary.
This isn't endemic to stuff you'll find at your grocer's. Computer companies have successfully trademarked the words "sun" and "apple," too.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I'm more than positive that the Motion Picture Association of America is more than prepared for dealing with that sort of chaff in today's legal atmosphere.
That's because they are that sort of chaff in today's legal atmosphere. This is the problem they've caused coming back to bite them in the ass. More "intellectual property" rights means they lose too. It's just a matter of how quickly they buy laws to undo the ones they've recently purchased to cause this sort of imbalance.
Argh! My eyes! My retinas are *bleeding*!
...
I wonder if he owns the trademark to utterly craptacular web design?
And some of the words?
Renaissance
Name of a period in history. A common word.
Stradivarius
Surname of a family of violin makers. Can you trademark someone else's name? And really expect them to licence it back from you?
Tirade
Hmm... I feel like going on one right now...
This guy is a total and utter bastard (is that one of his?) and his trademarking of words *and then going after people in unrelated industries* is even less convincing as a business tactic than anything SCO ever came up with.
Why Northrop Grumman caved in, I'll never know. They should have nailed his arse to the court documents and filed it under 'F' for
Slashdot needs a +1 makes the parent look like an idiot mod.
cause I would use that one all the time.
I see that Diamond still has their line of "Stealth" video cards. http://www.diamondmm.com/stealth.php I'm trying to find what year these cards initially launched.
Yes but, this guy is still an asshole. The reason Apple and Sun should be able to trademark their names in their realms is because it would be lame if someone was out there selling "apple" computers, but they aren't apple. This guy has gone out and totally abused this system to turn it into his own personal extortion scheme. This is the same kind of attitude problem that makes everyone have to suffer through mounds of spam and spend months securing their websites. Some people are just complete assholes and do not care about anyone else at all.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
managed to shut down "stealthisemail.com" (Steal This Email.com) because the URL coincidentally contains the word "stealth".
I had an acquaintance who worked at a company called Via Grafix in Pryor, OK. The company has been around at least since early nineties. Their website is viagrafix.com. He complained to me that they would get all this email about people asking about viagra. He said those people thought it said ViagraFix not ViaGrafix. I guess it was lucky they got the domain long before viagra came along.
They made a piece of software called DesignCAD, which is a stupid name, because CAD means Computer Aided Design.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Oddly enough, I had a run in with this guy last year, and almost submited a story about it.
Ok, so my friend and I bought this domain, stealthisidea.com - as in Steal This Idea, and then never did anything with it.
Last summer, we get a packet, 1 inch thick, telling us we're in violation if his trademark on stealth, and that we were to cease all operations imediatly, and hand over the domain, and be prepared to pay damages.
Thinking this guy was just mistaken, I called him to clear up the matter. From moment 1 he was rude and abusive on the phone, demanding we meet his demands. After explaining the situation, he seemed to loose all grip with reality. He said we were violating his rights. He said he would have the police seize our computers and shut us down, all sorts of over the top crap. He took a very forceful tone, and quite frankly pissed me off. I told him in no uncertain terms that it was inappropriate to make those threats, and he just starting shouting loudly over me...
After the phone call, I dug into my records. I'd signed up for some pay-per-month legal service, including the added protection for my business, and yet had never used it. After finding the contact info, I got ahold of 'my lawyer' (actually just a lawyer at the firm asigned to my account) and explained the situation. He had me fax over a copy of the complaint.
In conversations with the lawyer, he agreed it was a frivilous complaint. You can walk into any hobby store and see models on the shelf for stealth airplanes, no TM symbol to be found next to the word stealth, let alone on the websites of companies that make these planes.
He spoke with the gentleman (if you can call him that), and asked for the registration numbers of the marks in question - none were ever produced. He told the gentleman that if he got a lawyer to bring a suit agianst us for such a rediculous claim, that he'd request sanctions against that lawyer.
We never heard from the guy again.
In the original packet were photocopies of letters to various companies, including JVC, asking them to cease production of various products with Stealth in the name.
I don't know if this guy actualy owns these marks (we never did get proof, but the fact that I produced a lawyer so fast may have been a deterent), but I do know he is an agressive, rude, and harassing individual.
The whole thing made me want to go trademark the common term 'sneak' as an alternative - after all, if someone (supposedly) let him register stealth, sneak should be just as valid.
man is machine
For those of you like me
a bill of attainder is
Definition: A legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.
The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 provides that: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed."
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
If you're curious and want to know about other "stealth" trademarks, head over to the USPTO database at: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=search&state =embs7e.1.1 and use "stealth[bi] & `RN > 0 & live[ld]" as your search term. You'll pull up lots of live (i.e. enforceable) trademarks still in use using the word "stealth."
If nothing else, this guy is trying to make a fast buck by playing fast and loose with the trademark laws.
This guy needs a good swift kick in the balls.
Seriously.
I mean, hoW many movies about AI weapons that turn evil do we need?
One. War Games. Everything since is crap.
No, that's not infringement. This page explains the concepts of fair use and nominative use as they apply to trademark law.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
And besides, Joshua wasn't really evil, just a little confused.
The story should contain another link to the guy's site so we could slashdot the asshole. http://www.rentamark.com/
Four roommates. No microwave. You do the math.
The summary is wrong. He only sent a C&D letter to stealthisemail.com The site is quite operational...
I liked the bit about Northrop Grummond paying him $10 to go away.
BTW, IANAL, but I believe there is such a thing in trademark law as prior commercial use. And I think it would be very difficult to trademark a common English word and then sue everyone who uses it in any commercial context which is what he is doing.
I mean, that would be like Microsoft suing Windex because they make a cleaner for windows or Apple suing a bakery because they make apple strudels....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
His logos are genius. Simply put, the most profound use of the pixel since Pong. The colors are bold, never sassy, bright and in your face. The word "Sentra" becomes more than mere syllables or phonemes: it becomes a visual orgasm!
From Rentamark.com's Cease & Desist Section:
There are no well-known trademarks, service marks, trade names and/or domain names that have not already been adopted by some other company first; as in the case at bar. In the same manner that there is not any real property in the 21st Century that can be acquired for free or homesteaded. There is no free well-known intellectual property left in the 21st Century. No free rides!
I don't even know where to begin with this guy...
If I create the trademark "Quropiwla", which is a freely invented word, then I'm going to have a fair chanse demonstrating that anyone using that word does it in the intention of creating confusion with my product -- afterall, what other reason could there be ? It's unlikely someone would end up with that word by chance, and the word doesn't have any meaning as such.
If, on the other hand I register "Enjoyable" in the market for computer-input-devices (say I market joysticks) then it's not that obvious that others using this word does so in order to create confusion with my product. I'd probably still be able to stop other "Enjoyable" joysticks, but I doubt I'd have a case against say the "Enjoyable" computer-monitor.
Apple was rather careful from the outset to inform everyone that it should be called "Mac OS 9" and not "OS 9".
Microware's point of view was that they didn't need a win, just needed a legal basis to show that they hadn't abandond their trademark.
Essentially, the ruling was exactly that, and, IIRC, left the door open to revisit the issue if Apple were to drop the "Mac" part or attempt to use Mac OS 9 to enter the real-time domain.
It's safe to say he's a fucking sumbag. As the article noted, the purpose of a trademark is to prevent consumer confusion. So if I created Sycraft Amplifiers you cannot also go create Sycraft Amplifiers, that are much cheaper and inferior quality, and snag consumers with brand confusion.
I mean the guy sued Northrop for fuck sake. Nobody is going to confuse a B-2 Stealth bomber with anything this retard could make. He lacks the means to make military stealth aircraft, and the B-2 was first anyhow.
It's pretty clear this guy is just a scumbag who wants to leech money while doning nothing of value. I'm quite sure every dollar he collected for "charity" would have gone right in to his pocket.
He doesn't seem to be going after open source software yet. Maybe he figures that we can't afford to pay him off. My Nmap (Stealth) Security Scanner comes up as result #4 in a Google search for "stealth", higher than the upcoming movie and some other sites he has sued/threatened. Yet I haven't received anything. Not that I feel disappointed and left out or anything ...
;)
-Fyodor (who is now resuming the search for SCO products or marketing messages talking about Stealth
Damn, I'm going to trademark "Cock", and "Money Shot" and take over the porn industry.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I'm against unmitigated douchebaggery just as much as the next slashdotter, so I'm going to suggest that someone should really trademark this guy's name.
Then, every time he serves someone with legal papers, the trademarkee can write a C&D filled with flowerly language to him because the real, trademarked Leo "The Marktard" Stoller would never be such a mean person.
The guy claims to own "chutzpah" as well. What a putz.
you had me at #!
Why do people on /. continue to think that it's OK to copy entire articles ?
There are a variety of reasons, but in this case, it's because most people don't want to go to the hassle of registering with the NY Times to view an article. Sure, you can go to bugmenot (like I did), but that's almost as much hassle as registering.
Yes, it's copyright infringement, but I think that the benefit it provides (more people RTFA, leading to better discussion) outweighs any harm the NY Times suffers.
They lose ad revenue, but they also don't have to pay for the bandwidth of thousands of slashdotters viewing the article on their servers. (Note that this will never happen, unless they remove their registration requirement.)
Unlawful? Yes. Immoral? Maybe, but so is tracking people's reading habits, which is the only reason I can think of for requiring "free" registration.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
For everything else, there are lawyers.
And you'll be hearing from ours shortly. Thanks.
Mastercard Legal Department.
There's a bugmenot extension for Mozilla that will save you the hassle. :) Do give it a try, it's nice.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Just like we should hate and deride all computer programmers just coz some of them behave like bastards and write viruses.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
He also offers to license to you such phrases as: Adult Entertainment,Big Screen,Blue Collar, and Back Country.
I found this when I googled his name:- in-chicago-lawsuit-charge.html
i ctures-takes-on-leo-stoller.html
http://thettablog.blogspot.com/2005/04/defendants
There is a picture of his alleged office on that page too.
Also from the same site a post on the Columbia Pictures suit:
http://thettablog.blogspot.com/2005/05/columbia-p
The following qoute from the posting and the linked filing show that he hasn't been successful in enforcing his trademark like the NYT article leads you to believe.
Columbia's complaint includes a handy list of reported federal court cases involving Stoller and/or his companies. Columbia asserts that "No court in any reported opinion has ever found any infringement or dilution of any rights held by Stoller or his companies."
Stoller came after me back in March 2004 because I was using 'stealth' in my domain name - and still am! I documented it all here:
My Stoller Story. He was going after a hell of a lot of personal websites at the time, trying to scare money out of people. He deserves a good kicking. If it wasn't for the fact he was on the other side of the Atlantic I'd personally have torn him limb from limb.