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Woman Trademarks Name and Threatens Sites Using It
An anonymous reader writes "Be careful mentioning Dr. Ann De Wees Allen. She's made it clear that she's trademarked her name and using it is 'illegal... without prior written permission.' She even lists out the names of offenders and shows you the cease-and-desist letter she sends them. And, especially don't copy any of the text on her website, because she's using a bit of javascript that will warn you 'Copyright Protect!' if you right click on a link."
Mother names new born daughter "Ann de Wees Allen". Is this trademark infringement? By mother? Child? Or does it require a "Dr."? If so, who infringes, the PhD student? Or the university?
I think it is bad, as a matter of public policy, to allow trademarks on names. Otherwise I could be sued, since my name is Bob Weir.
I'd noticed that Chris Messina, the Open ID advocate and recent or current Google employee, had also trademarked his name recently. He displays it that way on internet profile pages. So far it has mostly been an inconvenience to me, in using the correct mark-up to designate TM whenever I quote him for some OAuth or OpenID article. I'd wondered why he possibly would want to trademark his name. He runs it all together as "chrismessina" or the character decimal code: chrismessina™ if I remembered the mark-up, of course!
tempus fugit
Heh, the actual owner of the trademark is 'NUTRILAB CORPORATION, INC.'. I assume she is part or full owner, but since it's a corp she could be voted out at a board meeting or sell her stake, at which point (by their logic) she could no longer use her own name without violating the trademark.
She says that using her name would be "illegal". That implies criminal. Isn't trademark infringement a civil matter?
According to dictionary.com, the distinction between "illegal" and "criminal" is that something is illegal if it is in violation of any statute, but criminal if it is in violation of a penal statute.
So, no, "illegal" does not imply "criminal": criminal is a strict subset of illegal.
Still it is amazing he amount of work put into it. Digging a bit more around, I found that the following sites all share the same ip: 64.106.155.30, and share the "Copyright Protect" JavaScript:
:-)
http://www.anndeweesallen.com/ http://www.nanoscienceinstitute.com/ http://www.glycemic.com/ http://www.glycemicindextesting.com/ http://www.glycemicresearchlaboratories.com/ http://www.nutrilabusa.com/ http://www.genefoundation.com/ http://www.ediblecomputerchips.com/ http://www.trutinadulcem.com/ http://www.skinnyscience.com/ http://www.skinnyscienceedu.com/ http://www.encoderesearch.com/ http://brsei.org/ http://www.humansportsperformance.com/ http://www.arginineresearch.com/ http://www.humanmaximumperformance.com/ http://www.argm2.com/ http://argandobesity.com/ http://arginineanswers.com/ http://glycemiclifestyle.com/ http://lowglycemicchocolate.com/ http://www.skinnyicecream.com/ http://www.skinnysciencecoffee.com/ http://skinnysciencelibrary.com/ http://sweetinfusedfruits.com/ http://encodefoundation.com/
But of course, I guess you should have guessed already by looking at the 'Edible Computer Chips' and 'Quantum Chocolate' mentioned at the front page
The big question is: is this a scam or a hoax?
Another famous case once lead to the "Audi" brand.
The founder of Audi, August Horch, was voted out of the board of his former company, Horch of Zwickau. So for his next company, he translated his name from German (Horch! = Hear!) to Latin, and thus Audi was born.