Slashdot Mirror
Victory for small business in domain disputes
A reader sent us the link-o-meter to the story about how Clue Computing beat toy giant Hasbro over a 3 year long legal dispute over clue.com (Hasbro owns the Clue board game). Some are hoping that this will mean small business have a precent to call in in the case of legal disputes over names trademarked by different folks-and in related news, Hasbro will be purchasing Wizards of the Coast, Magic:The Gathering card maker, and owner of TSR, Inc.
This is only partially true. A trademark is limited in scope - usually to a particular area of trade. There can be no infringement outside of this area (with the exception of well-known marks). The classic example in the U.S. is "Delta". I can think of three right now - Delta Airlines, Delta Faucets, and Delta Dental (insurance). Despite the use of the same name, these three do NOT conflict as far as trademarks go.
Well-known marks would include something like McDonalds, which covers so much ground that McAnything is going to have a problem (yes, I know about the McDonalds in Scotland, and there have been court cases in the U.K. about this very issue.)
Hasbro is throwing its weight around. Based strictly on trademark law, I'd expect Hasbro to lose the appeals, since 'Clue' is not a well-known mark, and there's no significant cross-over between areas of trade. I just hope that Clue Computing can hang in there for the rest of the proceedings.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Basically, while we all sit around and criticize these companies for throwing their weight around on smaller companies (don't get me wrong, I do it too), a company really has no other choice if they want to protect their trademark. According to corporate law, if someone can prove that you don't enforce your trademark, it becomes dilluted and your right to use it is weakened.
So a company with a trademark must use draconian measures of enforcement when defending their trademark -- they have no choice if they want to prove that to a court that they're enforcing it. And since cybersquatting has been a problem in the past, companies are probably advised by their lawyers that they MUST track down ANY potential use of their trademarked name, even in situations where it won't apply.
Of course, that means nothing to the poor small business owner (or private owner) who coincidentally is using a name that has been trademarked. It's certainly not fair to them at all -- and they don't really have the funds to defend against such matters, nine times out of ten.
It seems like a situation where no one can really win. If a company wants to retain the rights of their trademark, they have to crack down in every situation (which is why Red Hat is doing what they're doing these days). On the other hand, there's no reason why someone in a business completely unrelated to the trademark should ever have to be pushed around by a corporations legal teams.
The only way out of this is to either a) strengthen the rights of the people holding the trademark, so they don't have to enforce it all the time, or b) weaken the power of trademarks significantly, or even abolish it all together, so that no one can lay any kind of legal claim to a word or a phrase.
Either option has its problems, but I think that abolishing trademark would be better than strengthening it -- if it were strengthened, companies would probably find it more "convenient" to force people who had trademarked words in their domain names to hand them over, even if the domain names were used in a way completely unrelated to the trademark itself. If that were the case, sites like ajax.org would have been instantly overrun and they would have had no legal recourse whatsoever.
Hope that wasn't too disjointed...
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
The outcome is clearly correct. The question is whether Hasbro should be sanctioned for an abusive filing for initiating the frivolous litigation.
There are *many* categories of trademarks in the U.S. A trademark in one category does *not* in any way block the identical trademark from being used in another category. That Hasbro has registered "Clue" as a game would in no way stop Ford from building a car called "Clue."
Somehow, Hasbro has gotten the idea that trademarks reach *much* farther in domain names than they do anywhere else. This is simply fallacious, and worthy of sanctions.
hawk, esq., once again griping that judges in general are far too slow to use their authority to sanction frivolous filings.