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"Pez" Forbidden in Meta Tags
Ex Machina writes "According to the legal jargon on Pez.com:
"You may not embed Metatags (hidden text used by web search engines to find websites) into your website using any of the registered or
unregistered trademarks of Pez Candy, Inc. or its affiliates, in particular the PEZ® mark. Any such use of Metatags will be considered trademark infringement and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. "
Is there a precident for this case? I do believe this would fall under fair use--- for example, product reviews could be blocked if this was legitimized by a court. I fear lawyers. "
>First of all, WTF is an "unregistered
>trademark?". How can you know if you're
>violating an unregistered trademark or not?
>Maybe someone could clear up what they mean
>by this - but it sounds like nonsense.
Of course its not nonsense. A trademark is a name or symbol that, through usage and/or tradition, has become associated with or symbolic of a company or a product. Whether or not a trademark is registered has nothing to do with whether or not it is symbolic of a company. For example, in the US, if I say the words "Pink Panther" and "Fiberglass," most people will think -- without pause -- "Owens-Corning". What makes the trademark is that association in the mind of the consumer. The registration is just some red tape that affects what remedies you can or can not sue for.
And as for the originator of the thread, who asked if this wasn't protected by "fair use" -- my god, man, if I asked a question like "Hey, can't I distribute my specially modified Emacs as binary-only because it's protected by the BSD license?" you would jump all over me for being ignorant, stupid, and making statements about things I didn't bother to research. Fair Use is a limited exception (actually, an affirmative defense) to (American) Copyright law. There is no fair use defense to trademark law. Nor should there be.
The key question in trademark law is "Does the use of the trademark cause confusion in the consumer?" If the answer is yes, I've infringed. If it is no, I haven't. For example: "Coke is it!" is a trademark of the Coca-cola company. If in a skit in a movie about cocaine abusers, I snort a HUGE line of cocaine, look into the camera, grinning madly, saying "COKE IS IT!" that is probably not an infringement because no one is confused or thinks Coca-Cola (inc) produced the cocaine. On the other hand, if I am a small soda producer, and I put "Coke is it!" on the cans of my orange-flavored soda, a reasonable consumer might think that perhaps Coke produced the soda. That would be trademark infringement (actually, in my first example I might be liable for trademark dilution but that's another issue entirely.)
Pez's point of view is obviously that if someone types "Pez" into a search engine and they get back a bunch of links, a reasonable person might think that the returned sites might be somehow affiliated with Pez. Perhaps they're wrong, but I don't think its unreasonable of them to make the argument.
A few years back an anti-smoking organization had a campaign in the Stockholm underground (and maybe elsewhere) where they put the familiar "Welcome to Marlboro Country" line over a picture of a graveyard. That was perfectly legal since they were not trying to sell cigarettes (or clothes). The big bad tobacco company however changed advertisement bureau after that. How's that for lack of humour?
Furthermore, a trademark is only protected in the domain where it is active. You could probably sell candy named "Marlboro" (or cigarettes called "Pez") without worry.
Where's the advice?
Has anyone located an email address for these fools so that we in the community at large can educate them? Perhaps they are not malicious, and are rather just clueless as to how the web works.
> When someone types "pez" into a search engine, > what is it they are looking for? This is EXACTLY the point. It is my impression that Pez USA wants its website to come up first. (As an aside, there are two Pez companies... Pez USA in Orange CT, and Pez Haas in Austria). I have a car that I've covered with more than 1400 pez dispensers. I call it the "PezCar". I have a web page that talks about it ( http://users.ev1.net/~criff/pez ). www.pez.com has specificly called me out for using PEZCAR. My site does not sell pez, and I make no claim to be the company. So what is my liability?
Ed,
It doesn't have to be enforceable. If you have a webpage on one of the free webservers such as Xoom or Geocities, the lawyers will simply contact the service provider and state their policy. The service provider will then delete your site without contacting the you.
Of course, this isn't a problem if you are using your own server or your ISP is kind enough to contact you first.
cheers
sand
--
"What would you do with a brain if you had one?" Dorothy, Wizard of Oz
--
Serious. Get a job, you have way too much time on your hands. Oh crap, I am just as sorry for replying. *sigh*
Do you mind my asking why they were pestering you? Trademark infringement?
-- Virtual Windows Project
A friend of mine who runs SearchEngineWatch has been very interested in the meta tag lawsuits and has actually been an expert witness for Terri Welles in Playboy's meta tag lawsuit against her.
He has a very interesting page listing Meta Tag Lawsuits which summarizes some of the recent cases, whether they have been settled, and the importance of the settlement.
My understanding is that the courts have ruled that you cannot use trademarked meta tags if you are attempting to deceptive with them (see Oppedahl & Larson v. Advanced Concepts) or attempting to "hijack" another web page. But if you have a legitimate reason to be using a trademark term to properly catalog your site then its use would be legitimate.
I don't think the courts have made a definitive ruling on the legitimate use of trademarked terms in meta tags yet. But that might happen in the Terri Welles countersuit. And she did win her original case allowing her to use trademarked terms on her site. And Playboy was denied an appeal.
I'd say Pez fan sites have a legitimate reason to use the term in meta tags based on the Playboy vs. Terri Wells case. But the sad thing here is that PezCandy has a right to sue and small players without the resources to fight back will simply back down.
Hopefully we'll get a definitive ruling on this soon from somebody who can afford to fight back.
Joachim
The following are cross-posted from Cyberia-L. My apologies for cross-posting, but I thought Shashdot might appreciate these comments, too . . . (1)________________________ If Pez even thinks about going after you (or sends a cease-and-desist letter), please do give me a call. This is one I'll enjoy. Eric (2)___________________ Martin Simon mentioned the "Bally" case: The Bally citation is certainly helpful. But why deal execusively with the easy cases (critical websites, general "candy" subject meta-sites, official PEZ licensees, or even poetry about PEZ)? What PEZ knows and is trying to cash in on is that a secondary market has developed for classic PEZ dispensers. Not that PEZ hasn't tried to foster and encourage the self-same secondary market. Not that they haven't profited from increased consumer-market sales becuase this secondary market exists. Nevertheless, someone in their legal department must have stumbled upon the bright idea "hey, why don't we try to charge a trademark license fee every time someone tries to auction one of those darn things on Ebay." The idea is simply obscene. Imagine if people had to pay a trademark license fee every time someone posted a classified advertisment in the newspaper offering a used Ford or Honda for sale. Even if you advertise the car is in "mint" condition and still has the dealer sticker in the window (and even if you publish a photograph of the car along with the ad), the secondary market transaction is hardly a trademark infringement. Of course PEZ may still have legitimate trademark (or trade dress) rights in cases such as the mass sale of counterfeit PEZ dispensers. I remember Wizards of the Coast had a problem with something similar a few years back concerning their game "Magic -- the Gathering." But ordinary secondary-market transactions involving PEZ dispensers (even if they command OBSCENELY high prices) simply should not be the subject of trademark enforcement. Just another example of how some trademark interests have gone completely overboard with litigation and the threat of litigation. Regards, Eric > -----Original Message----- > From: Law & Policy of Computer Communications > [mailto:CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM]On Behalf Of Martin Samson > Sent: Thursday, October 07, 1999 2:05 PM > To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM > Subject: Re: "Pez" Forbidden in Meta Tags > > > In Bally Total Fitness Holding Corp. v. Andrew S. Faber, 29 F.Supp.2d 1161 > (C.D. CA. Nov. 23, 1998), the court held that the creator of a > non-commercial "consumer complaint" site could use the Bally trademark in > the meta tags of his website to attract users. Said the court: > > The average internet user may want to receive all the information > available > on Bally. The user may want to access the official Internet site > to see how > Bally sells itself. Likewise, the user may also be apprised of > the opinions > of others about Bally. This individual will be unable to locate sites > containing outside commentary unless those sites include Bally's marks in > the machine readable code. The machine readable code is the > hidden part of > the Internet upon which search engines rely to find sites that contain > content which the individual user wishes to locate. The basic > mechanics is > that the web page designer places certain keywords in an > unreadable portion > of the web page that tells the search engines what is on a particular page > upon which search engines rely. Prohibiting Faber from using Bally's name > in the machine readable code would effectively isolate him from > all but the > most savvy of Internet users.
try insert your favorite trademarked term here.really.fuckingsucks.net.
eg:
this.really.fuckingsucks.net and pez.really.fuckingsucks.net
Note that it is all dynamic content... no trademarked terms actually exist on this site.
IANAL, but I did get a degree in broadcast communications. Which included lengthy converage of communciations law. If I'm not mistaken, the media (i.e. news, magazones, legitimate news sources) cannot be burdened with trademark or copyright infringement if used in a verifiable news story, article or event.
I can write a magazone article about PEZ and slam them for something, use thier name and trademarks, as long as I do not say anything that is not factual or without grounds. So, if CNN.com does a story on PEZ, then they should be able to use the name, meta-tags, etc. without fear of being sued for it. Even though they indirectly profit from the PEZ name if a lot of people are interested in PEZ and go visit the site and CNN.com earns a bunch of money from click throughs.
Now, if the PHEZ Candy Co. decides to use the PEZ name to get users to thier website to buy similar PEZ style, PHEZ candy dispensers, then there is a problem and PHEZ can be found guilty of infringement, because they are luring buyers.
I highly doubt that it's in the best interest of the PEZ Co. to go after every PEZ fan site on the internet. They are going to worry about anyone stealing from them, or giving them a bad name. Wrong or right, they might go after a site that sells the dispensers and isn't authorized to do so, like a collector.
my $0.02,
colin stefani
Actually, the US has no official language. So pez (the Spanish word) could be considered a common word in America as well.
Just something to think about.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
that's exactly what i will do tommorow with my 9 domains ... how do you get someone to do something? tell them they can't mike
This post is from Italy, where lawsuits last longer than lives.
... ....
We have a very reform-willing government and a very info-ignorant burocracy.
(We actually have a law that defines a valid, legally-equivalent [possibly even more valued] electronic signing mechanism. And its 2 years already; obviously law is written but very little has happened)
So copyright lawsuits on digital media can really be a NIGHTMARE here.
That said.
This situation has already happened us twice. Last december and last may.
Assibit (italian only) is an insurance broker and an Internet company.
One would imagine insurance companies actually would want to be on our site. Usually our intent is to sell THEIR product after all. So we setup pages on car insurance willing to get relations with various direct marketing and phone-maketing oriented companies.
We obviously had metatags on the subject including most companies names.
Not only we got request to cancel this stuff but in one case reaction was actually VERY aggressive.
We haven't managed to get relations with these 2 companies. (but we have with many others)
In our perspective this ends up in a loss of opportunity for them.
But this is not how they percieve it. Management (and I think this behaviour occurs more or less in any trading sector) thinks they are actually defending their trademark. They do this on the (IMHO wrong) idea that, on the web, intermediaries are a useless cost. (from reselling to search engines we all are intermediaries some way... )
This ends up in weird behaviour like having only one site on the web with your trademark.
They think they will get more hits from search engines like this. Which is true for people searching for their trademark, but not for people searching form their products...
Evidence comes from the fact that we haven't lost a single user from removing the companies names, its just them loosing visibility on searches.
In the one aggressive case, they were accusing us for being ahead of them in a couple of queries on altavista (besides they were spamming the engine), as if they owned some right on the position
Time will mend this, and some bad experiences will help
What we actually did was drop the whole thing, if they WANTED to lose the customers we could bring them, there was no point in actually reviewing their service at all.
BTW. Has anyone ever got REALLY in a lawsuit on this? pointers?
While the law is pretty much still up in the air on this type of thing, I know of at least one relevant case which would suggest that Pez couldn't possibly win a lawsuit over this.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-328661.html
This article describes the case of Terri Welles and Playboy Enterprises, in which Playboy sued and lost.
Sorry, I must have mis read this from that page
For example: You may NOT use the PEZ® mark (or any other registered trademark belonging to Pez Candy, Inc. or its affiliates) on your website or your business in any way, shape or form.
Silly me, I thought that the "in any way, shape or form." meant exactly that. I guess I was wrong.
Sarcasm is a wonderful thing, no?
---The proceeding comments were not paid for by the following advertisers.
Well they can say it on a web site. But ofcourse they can't force you to take something down without going to court. And then they have to convice a Judge (and maybe a jury) why you should. So if you have "Free Pez" in the meta tags and a lot of Smut then you are in hot water. On the other hand if you have a bunch of pictures of old PEZ dispensers you are probably ok.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
geez! CT musta pulled an all nighter. theres no need to be functional before 8AM :P
any takers???
my budget is shot this month....
Aren't we violating the stupid page by putting "PEZ®" everywhere on slashdot, as well? :)
Jolly hope so. Kick ass.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Hormel -did- get pissed off a year or two ago, but it was far too late for them to be able to enforce anything. Maybe if they'd done something 10-15 years ago ... still probably wouldn't have mattered. It's like asking someone for a Kleenex. Or having a Xerox machine in the office. It just doesn't follow anymore that those actual brands are involved.
I can't imagine any colloquial uses for PEZ, but maybe that's the point - their lawyers may be trying to prevent PEZ from ending up like SPAM.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
I think the copyrights laws have gone crazy. At first it was supposed to protect the names of legitimate business to prevent any competitor to abuse customers by using the same names. It was a protection against unlawful business tactics.
Now it is just a way for monopolies to control whatever is said about them. Write "XXX Corp is crap", and you can get sued because you wrote "XXX Corp" without their consent. This has nothing to do with unlawful business anymore, it is just the megacorpo taking away free speech, to make more money.
In a way, yes. I had put up a protest site about the botched RHAT IPO affair, which featured a parody of their logo. At least that's what I supposed what it was all about. But, it could also have been copyright infringment due to the numerous scanned faxes. Or maybe, they weren't thrilled with my version of the story. Who knows? As the IP block was quite successful they didn't really get around to send a cease and desist order, and so I don't know what exactly they would have objected to.
If it is unregistered, it is not a trademark!
It sounds like more legal bullying. I think that we need more laws involving the abuse of law. (I believe the principle is known as barratry(sp?).) Maybe it is also time to start limiting the protections of corporatate officers against criminal penalties for initiating such actions.
I think I've already violated this one...
Error 404 HTTP Error 404
404 Not Found
The Web server cannot find the file or script you asked for. Please check the URL to ensure that the path is correct.
Please contact the server's administrator if this problem persists.
Yes; could be blocked.
If it only concerns meta-tags, just drop them if you want to review a new Pez-dispenser.
Even if you are a competitor, in US trademark law, comparative advertising is fair use. Otherwise, Intel would be suing Apple right now. Hell, Intel would be suing every chip maker that has published benchmarks. If you made a page on your candy site publishing the results of a market survery of "which candy people like better, PEZ(tm) or FOO(tm)," and put pez in your META tags, it's most certainly legal. Especially since it's more than possible someone is actively looking for a PEZ(tm) vs. FOO(tm) market survey.
I know in some countries comparative advertising is actually illegal. Maybe it is in the UK, I don't know. In the US it's pretty common. I suppose if the makers of FOO(tm) were a german company (i think germany is one country where it is illegal, but I could be wrong), I suppose PEZ could sue them IN GERMANY.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
Only if you are a competitor selling candy and you are trying to get more visitors to your site by using the Pez trademark, then a court can stop you from doing this.
Things like product reviews are no trademark infringements and therefore allowed, regardless of what they say in their legal blurb.
If this is legitimized, imagine what is next, could they then turn around and say that slashdot violated their copyright by using their name on the main page?
This just seems to violate free speech totally, I guess we'd better rush out and put similar clauses into everything we own too huh?
This just proves that there are more lawsuits than legitimate cases.
---The proceeding comments were not paid for by the following advertisers.
Among a number of other stupid and unnecessary corporate giveaways, the Act criminalized defeating "any technological protection measure which effectively protects a right of a copyright owner". The word "effectively" is carefully redefined from its normal meaning to include basically any protection, no matter how easily defeated.
But region coding (supposedly) protects a movie company's distribution schedule. So UK viewers aren't importing Phantom Menace DVDs from the US while the movie is just hitting theatres in London. This is NOT a "copy protection" device. And so is NOT illegal to defeat this.
Noe if you're talking about defeating the macrovision circuitry, you MAY have an point (unless macrovision interferes with viewing which it does on some TV sets, and that's why you're disabling it).
I know a guy who uses the handle Pez D. Spencer -- is he going to have to change his email now? What a frickin' joke. These people must be working with whoever at Unisys decided to sue everyone over the *.gif's...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Then it isn't trademark infringement. If my (fictional) mate Peter, who goes by the nickname of "Pez", uses it, then there's nothing they can do, as he isn't using it to trade.
http://www.iffmfish.com/ cgi-bin/WebObjects/iffm/BuyFish.wo
There's at least one, but not pez in the metatag.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I suppose next Intel will prevent us from using the letter "I" in any searchable post in a website (it really is trademarked!).
Oops! I just did it. I did it again. I did it again....
How'd you do that?
''
ah, lt and gt tags?
Is there some joke I don't know about? Is PEZ some crazy geek icon like Spam? Who the hell embedded "PEZ" in their code?
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Now...I think the idea behind this legal threat is good because every porn site on the planet is putting legitamate words in their tags so searching on the name of any famous female yeilds a ton of porn links.
Maybe there is a huge market for underground PEZ porn and this how they are trying to stop it?
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
An interesting related article is http://www.fenwick.com/html/free_ride_.htm
Tell your friends about xenu.net
And perhaps if we want to criticize our respective governments we should use thinly veiled allegory and not the real names of officials or actions. In the US, Norway, and anywhere that there is true political freedom, such a suggestion would be justly ridiculed. In places which have less political freedom, the suggestion might allow brave and valiant protest that would otherwise be silenced.
Clearly we can remove the Meta tags. We can also use allegory to express our political views. One does what one must to continue to exist within the rules of a society. My question is how a society goes from complete repression to a more open one. I think the answer is that individuals push the envelope of acceptablity more and more until the natural right of being able to speak ones mind is liberated.
So if we accept a small restriction on our collective freedom of speech, we will continue to live and exist as a society, but I believe everyone will suffer from the decrease in freedom and push at the boundaries until those restrictions are relaxed. We will continue to fight restrictions on expression until we get to a balance of our rights to speech against other's rights of property, information, and freedom from confusion. (And then we'll fight some more)
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I never expected to see PEZ on Slashdot. This is so cool. I have to admit, I'm one of those crazy PEZheads. I have a PEZ site, I have "PEZ" in my meta tags, I have PEZ-related images all over my site, and I have yet to be contacted officially by PEZ Candy Inc for anything (but I wouldn't doubt that it could happen). PEZheads all over the 'net waited literally months and months for the official pez.com site to go online; and it finally gets here, and lo and behold the "PEZ cop" is greeting us with a note about copyrights. We were all disappointed. You would not believe the number of PEZheads online, many of us with nice sites dedicated to PEZ. We spread the hobby of collecting, we give them free publicity (conventions, news articles, etc), we are basically adverising and promoting PEZ for free, and the internet is our main medium. The note on the site wasn't what we expected, but it no longer seems like a big deal. Pez.com went up almost a year ago, and the note really hasn't changed anything. No one's really upset anymore. AFAIK, no site has been "prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law" for using the word PEZ.. I assumed the copyright notice was just the advice of paranoid lawyers for a company that was new to the net... the thing that worries me is that the note hasn't been changed since the site opened. I wonder if they're serious?
p9k. the guy with almost 300 PEZ dispensers in his room
I am not a lawyer nor am I american (which probably disqualifies me from commenting, but I'll do so anyways)......but CAN this really be done?
/. going to recieve from bringing just this comment :)
I am thinking like this. If I say to a friend: "Boy, I really like those new PEZ-candy" - then it's okay. If, however I write the same sentence on my WWW-page, then it's copyright violation?
If it's in metatags or not, it seems to me that PEZ doesn't want to have their name mentioned anywhere on the web. Quote from their legal stuff:
You may NOT use the PEZ® mark (or any other registered trademark belonging to Pez Candy, Inc. or its affiliates) on your website
According to this, how many lawsuits are
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
I have no idea how you could legally enforce it (I don't think you can to be honest) but I understand the original post. What he is saying (quite rightly) is that a lot or porn sites (and I have nothing against porn!!) use padded meta tags, invisible text, even dummy dns entries to get extra hits. Go to somewhere like excite which uses a spider, search for, say, "Demi Moore". Now maybe what I wanted was a bio, a list of films, maybe a fan club. What I actually get is thousands upon thousands of "sites" called "DemiNekkidPics.com", "DemiMooreMpegs.com" etc etc which just point to redirectors which then take you to a site with nothing to do with Demi. Just porn. Now I'm not criticising the porn itself, just that if you are trying to get "legitimate" (I guess that means non-porn) info, searching is virtually impossible - too much garbage to wade through.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
When someone types "pez" into a search engine, what is it they are looking for?
The answer is, clearly I hope, the second. The problem is that corporates don't see the world this way. The thought that people might search for their name, but go to their multi-million dollar, often content-void site but instead go to the place where the information they actually want may be found, leaves them dizzy.
Meta-tags are a mechanism which allows the author of a page to specify some keywords which describe the content. It works reasonably well. It is not intended, and does not function as a mechanism for identifying the official site relating to a trademark.
As a non-lawyer, and in an utterly non-advice-giving manner, I'd suggest that attempting to use trademark law to prevent other people saying "my site talks about Pez too!" is probably asking the courts to go too far. But then I'd have said suing mcdonalds when you spill coffee on yourself was unlikely to succeed either.
If the law sides with the corporates on this, then it can only be because they don't understand what search engines are for (You want information, not marketing). And they will have made the wrong decision.
It can be very hard to respect the law sometimes, so I've given up on doing so for the time being...
From http://www.pez.com/HTML/Pezinfo.html:
We hope that you enjoy our site and find it informative and resourceful. We also invite you to visit the many other PEZ related web sites created by some very talented and dedicated PEZ collectors.
So, they obviously like the PEZ fan homepages, but I'm really not sure how to make a PEZ fan homepage (yuck, people really have weird hobbies) without using the trademarks. Maybe someone can clear this up?!
That last bit means 'PEZ' just by itself.
I think that their lawyers latched onto a trendy concept (let's ban metatags!), and didn't do any research whatsoever...
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
U.S. law allows for "fair use", meaning that practically any word or phrase can be used within certain contexts. This prevents the hobbling of free speech.
Playboy has had less luck in their case against ex-playmate Terri Welles. The C|Net article states "[T]he judge found in favor of Welles, stating she is entitled to 'fair use' of the trademarks, and that her site was not 'diluting' Playboy's trademarks."
To show the patent (ack!) absurdity of Pez's position, look at this example.
You've written an online history of candy companies, including several mentions of Pez. You add the word Pez to your metatags. This is clearly fair use as you are not attempting to deceive people by implying that you represent the Pez company.
Think about it. Metatags are nothing new. They are nothing more than the internet equivalent of a book's index.
It is interesting to note that the guy who created e-bay got the idea for the company while trying to sell/trade pez dispensers. If Pez were the schmucks they are way back, there might have never been an e-bay. Taste the bitter candy of censorship as our freedoms are dispensed with.
... We also invite you to visit the many other PEZ related web sites created by some very talented and dedicated PEZ collectors.
Reading between the lines, they don't care about PEZ pages, but they care about people passing themselves off as PEZ. If that's their intention - good for them. I hope it leads to lawsuits against those greedy, irresponsible webmasters that have the gall to use metatags such as this to attract children, something I abhor as a parent. It is also something that the press have latched on to as yet another example of why the Internet is intrinsically evil, so I say good for them.
The law in this area is complex and rather unsettled at the moment, though we are seeing more and more decisions on point every month.
You infringe a trademark when you use a mark in commerce in a manner that would create a likelihood of confusion or a likelihood of deception as to source, origin, affiliation, etc. These are all essential elements. However, the ownership of a trademark is not the same as ownership of a word: the word, generally speaking, remains available for denominative use. (That is, I can still be a playboy if my wife will let me, but I cannot sell Playboy-brand services that would give rise to a likelihood of confusion)
Confusing things further is that use of a competitor's trademark in a truthful and non-misleading comparative ad is (in the US, not everywhere) a blessed activity, protected by trademark policy as well as the first amendment. By its nature, such an ad does not create confusion, but to the contrary, makes stark contrast between the advertiser's goods and the trademark-owner's goods.
But it is odd that an ad on a website which slams to, but not over the brink, of honesty a product by name is blessed, while informing users via metatags or iNet portal keyword purchases that their interest in a competitor's product implies they should look at their different product. And thus, this may not be, and is probably not, the law.
But the devil is in the details -- cases swing 180 degrees depending upon subtle facts -- and the Courts are just now beginning to articulate how we distinguish between fair competition and unlawful infringement, between fair "hey, look at me when you look at them" competition, and "hey, buy my stuff because I'm them" free-riding on another's goodwill.
I wish I could report simple, bright-line rules to govern conduct in this arena today, but they don't exist as I write this. Just as in plain, published prose, some uses of a trademark of another in a metatag may be infringing, while other uses may not be. The particular facts of each case, including the particulars of the mark itself, will determine the result.
More seriously, this is ridiculous.
Also, the leagalese says all feedback becomes their property. I couldn't find a feedback link...
Basically correct, but the DVD thing is a very bad example, because defeating the region coding on DVDs is illegal in the United States.
Suppose I wished to defeat regional coding on DVD's. I could do this by importing DVD players with different regional codings from various countries, thus giving me a "full set" of DVD players. While expensive, this is not illegal: for example, I could be building a computer in one country for re-export to another country that corresponds to that region coding. In fact, if companies wanted to stop me importing these players, they may themselves be guilty of violating free-trade laws.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
PEZ(tm) is a US company, right?
:)
Is it then unreasonable to assume that they are using US layers to inforce a US law?
I am walming a chair in Sydney Australia right now. What if, when I was 19 years old, I put up a 2 page confession to buying a case of beer, which to your US layes is a crime, but in Austalia they will help you to your car with it.
If I put this page up on say Geocities (US company) is that a crime? vs. say putting it on a server in my home land?
My point boils down to a matter of boundries. Can Pez(tm) drag me off this walm chair and half way accross the earth to be sued in an American court room for infringement of copywrite if my beer page is META'd up with PEZ references? I know they won't, but CAN they? I hope not, I hate your beer, no offence
Secondary point: You know we are all in the wrong game, don't you? What do you reckon these layers are being paid for their trivial persuits?
if you dont want your children accessing 'objectionable' material, you either supervise them, or dont let them go online. its your responsibilty to make sure they dont access stuff you dont want them to see, not anybody elses. if you dont want your kids accessing a porno site with "pez" in the metatags, just set your netnanny(or similar software) to block all sites with the string 'pez' in it. the base for your post is that "it gets rid of objectionable sites posing as the official site". if you think about it, 'pez' isn't really an objectionable word. i'm sure porno site webmasters dont say "hey if we put the word 'pez' in our metatags we can lure all the little children to our site and corrupt their minds. MUHAHAHAHA!!!". just my opinion on the matter anyways
If you are not selling different products under a name PEZ on the net it's Okay! Also You can sell PEZ candy stuff like on E-bay! I am a layer! I think that PEZ candy Lawer does not really understand the diffeent legal jargon law that happends over the Internet, like I do! You can use PEZ meta tags because PEZ has many Different meanings in other countries! If you get a lawsuit from PEZ let me know I help you SUE them! jbert@lafirm.com
xerox lost trademark status... whoever handles these things decided it was a common word, and so you can "xerox" a piece of paper with a xerox machine not made by Xerox, the company.
or so was my understanding, for, as always, IANAL
Lea
Or
1111 1111 11111 1 1 1
111 111 1
1 1 1
1 1111 1111
"Your honor, it doesn't use the complainant's trademark. It clearly says, '1111 1111 1111.'"
Looks terrible in Lynx! Rob, please stop making everything centered. It is hard to read when the whole page is center-aligned. Grumble, grumble.
(Second attempt to subvert the fancy tables and centering)
XXXX..XXXX..XXXXX..X..X.......X.
XXX...XXX....X..
X.....X.....X...
X.....XXXX..XXXX
"Your honor, it doesn't use the complainant's trademark. It clearly says, 'XXXX..XXXX..XXXX.'"
What I see in the preview is not how it shows up when submitted. :-(
Pez makes copiers?
I don't know if anyone else knows this, but pez means fish in spanish! This throws their whole dirty trademark out the window! "I was simply refferring to the word fish in spanish". Also, I don't know if anyone's said this yet, but Pez probably won't go around suing everyone, its just to cover their bases. furthermore, pez means fish.
US copyright laws overrule all other considerations.
This is dumb. So if I develop software with Delphi or Visual Basic (god forbid), then I cannot put those words in my meta keywords? What about Java? What if I like Coke? What if I wear Levi's, and have a Dell. What if I sell any of these things? This is ridiculous. Meta tags are for categorization, and searching. To claim that is the same as trademark infringement is preposterous.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Once I was designing a web page for a company, and put all the company's competitors' names in the Meta tags. A few months later we got a nasty letter from one of the companies I'd named threatening legal action. Not wanting any trouble, I changed the tags accordingly.
While legally I don't think I did anything wrong, I still can't take the moral high ground here - I was trying to trick people into visiting a website they may not have been interested in.
When I first got involved with the web, it was with a news-like organization. We produced some material, it was legitimately copyrighted. And we felt the impulse to ensure that nobody stole it and used it on their web site.
Of course, this was impossible, right or wrong. And no matter how many lawyers we had, and even if they worked for free (one did), there was simply no way to efficiently eliminate all traces of copyright violation. There are too many millions of people with the ability to copy something, and it took too much effort to even warn them about copyright violation.
Yes, copyright and trademark still exist on the web; nobody can effectively copy your site wholesale, nobody can get away with selling phony products under your name for very long, nobody can use your trademarks to direct people to their own site. Those sorts of major violations are easy enough to counter, just as they have always been. But when you talk about a zillion little violations... like fans using your name in their metatags... let it go. You can't win. All you'll accomplish is to piss off your loyal customers.
That said, I understand the need for these disclaimers; if they were actually chasing down minor violators, that would be quite annoying. A better idea is to protect a trademark by specifically allowing it to be used in certain ways, and having the lawyers chase down only the worst abusers.
The web works under a sort of de facto copyright law: if it can be done below the radar of the lawyers, then you might as well condone it, because you can't stop it.
This sure is a snotty website. The FAQ's favorite word seems to be "no" in a PR standpoint. Jeez.
I'm getting a little suspicous of Pez's business practices. They claimed they accidentally made incorrectly colored pez dispensers, and say thankfully only a few were made. Then you have the opportunity to buy them. Sounds like they are trying to make ebay-able items on the fly.
Indeed, that's what they want. Intimidation is a major tool of their trade.
Why does Slashdot legitimize these crackpots by giving them worldwide attention? Obviously their folly should be completely ignored.
This is not directly related to the PEZ case, but very relevent to the tradmmark discussion in general. A lot of the comments here refer to the fact that Trademarks are only valid when used in association with the appropiate trade section, eg Bills Fruit and Apple store has nothing to fear from Apple Computers.
However, this is not the case in the UK where the 1994 Trade Marks Act extended that protection to dissimilar products. but it has not been effective because companies have argued successfully that they had a valid reason to adopt the name. According to a Story in the Financial times Visa successfuly blocked the use of their trademark in regard to a unrelated product (Condoms, in this case)
This could have a worse precedent than the PEZ case
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
could be a club of people who like aquaria (not sure if that's english) and most of those things do have fish in them.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Also, in the UK trademarks are case sensitive. Several years ago Intel served notice on Personal Computer World magazine for using the word 'Intel' without mentioning that is was a trademark. PCW told them to shove it as 'Intel' was not a registered TM but 'intel' was.
This new bit of jargon just lept out and hit me.
/-
Pez: (n) a small candy brand, originally dispensed
by plastic Pez-dispensers. Dispensers are now collectable. Thought to be a gimmik used to sell more Pez by claiming to be a smoking-habit substitute (with the dispensers).
Pez (2): n & v Silly pointless babble, made to
seem serious by either threats of litigation or
an ornate Public Relations mechanism, known as
a "Pez dispenser". Possibly more verb-able as
pezzing.
-/ Well, that's a little inexact. I guess you
really do nead jargon-file gathering types out
there, it's harder than it looks!
Or am I just Pezzing here?
Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him. * -** *-** --- *-- - **** * *-*
Oh dear. Don't I feal stupid now ;) maybe I should have done some research before posting.
I have massively violated the PEZ Policy. http://www.pabs2000.com/pabs_info/pez.html
There have been a number of cases involving meta tags. I keep a page about the topic at http://searchenginewatch.com/ resources/metasuits.html.
The short answer is:
-- Anyone can sue anyone
-- Winning is another issue. The legalities of trademark terms in meta tags (or indeed, anywhere on a web page) are still being sorted out. Unfortunately, there's been too much emphasis on meta tags as some how requiring special regulation.
My Pez website is screwed.
sup
: If a company holds a trademark and don't
: pursue _every_ "alleged unlawful" use of
: it, then they can't pursue _any_ of them
Then they've made their own job impossible with this policy. What's the chance they'll be able to trace down and eliminate the thousands of pages that currently mention Pez? If they simply pursued the naughty ones--say, sites trying to sell knock-off products with "Pez" hidden in their META tags--then it would be reasonable.
Now I'm looking for a lawyer who forces (under penalty threat) the Wild West Web community NOT TO USE THE COPYRIGHTED NAME '<html>' IN ANY PART OF A WEB SITE ANY LONGER, ELSE ...
Would that work, and if yes, what could be done to stop nonsense like that?
Use The Source, Luke!
Since each of the strings "PEZ", "Pez", "pez", etc will come up about once in 16.7MB of random 8-bit data, we have all probably violated it in "some way, shape, or form." Compressed data is pretty random but not so predictable as encrypted data where the once-per-16.7MB rule would hold pretty true.
;)
At least I don't put encrypted or compressed data in my meta tags or they'd probably have sued me by now.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
--
First of all, since Pez is a trademark, the Pez company has a lot of leeway as to what they can and cannot do with their trademark. In this case, it seems to me like they are trying to cover their ass - preventing their trademark from being used by porn sites and the like. Has anyone actually heard of any of the Pez collectors being approached by Pez, Inc, to have sites taken down? I doubt it, since it isn't mentioned. Have they sued anyone yet? How long has this policy been in place?
In this case, I'd bet dollars to donuts that this policy is not meant to be used against legit collectors - only against people who try to resell in violation of their reseller agreements(which is a massive violation, and not of free speech), who slander the company(Pez is poison!), and those who use it in a sex site ( That girl's got a great set of Pez!) Like many other topics here on Slashdot, I think there is a large amount of overreacting going on here. Lawyers occasionally overstep while attempting to cover their butts. Their policy says one thing - let's not worry until they start enforcing it hardcore. I got better things to do with my time.
The problem there is you don't know their IP address unless it's clear from the logs who they are. To solve this problem here is a neat trick. Most people uses a mail reader that supports HTML encoding. You can embed an small one pixel image or perhaps a business card in your email. It should be embedded as an external image with no actual data in the mail.
Assuming they are using a mail reader that will fetch the image (Outlook will), you will have your IP address as soon as they read their mail. Outlook uses IE to fetch such images, so even if they are going through a proxy you'll know the right IP. This is also a useful trick to learn the exact time someone has read your mail... it can also be used to learn where someone lives, by using a traceroute to their IP address. hehe.
If they are using a web-based mail account this won't work of course, but most businesses don't.
-- Virtual Windows Project
We need a new tag to mark important words within the text. Such as:
This page discusses the different <keyword>flavors</keyword> and <keyword>colors</keyword> of <keyword>Pez</keyword> <keyword>candy</keyword>
The meta tags are seperate from the page, you can't normally see them, but I don't think a court will easily censor the contents of a web-page.
EjB
Der Idiot hat offenbar viel zu viel Kölsch getrunken ...
(The idiot obviously had way too much Kölsch[1] Beer to drink.)
While I am normally against the death penalty, it does seem uniquely well suited for people like this, who not only try to get a free ride using someone elses work, but do so with deliberate, malicious intent to harm the communal good as widely as possible. Parasites of the lowest order. *sigh*
[1]Kölsch is a type of beer brewed in Cologne, the hometown of the fool trying to trademark "@"
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
a coworker of mine had a pretty
interesting theory, when i expressed
exasperation that they actually had
the "copyright police" thing on their main page,
saying it sounded like they were
planning for a large legal battle; perhaps
ebay being the target?
-adam
The issue being argued by the manufacturers of Pez is not trademark or coppyright. They can controll the use of their name under Privacy Law, specifically the misappropriation or right to publicity. In a supreme Court Case Zacchini v. Script Howard Broadcasting in 1977, the SC ruled that public/private and commercial entities have the right to regulate and controll their publicity, this includes the use of their name.
Less exposure is bad after all.
Guess we're going to have to start referencing it as "the-candy-formerly-known-as-PEZ"
;-)
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Totally a knee-jerk uninformed reaction to a knee-jerk uninformed reaction, now let me quote their press release, and you can use your brain to figure it out
What IMO it appears they are trying to do is not shut down porn sites from hijacking their webpage hits, but shut down fan sites. They run a collectors store off of their website and they probably don't like Joe and John Public running a personal trading site, because it cuts into their profits.
The Pet Rock and all other trademarks you see today are registered to Biff Cool you may not think about them under penalty of law unless appropriate royalty fees are payed. That and I've got a patent pending on posting comments
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
I think this is probably to prevent some damn porn site from doing what ZDNet called "domain hijacking", but is really just copying the Pez page because no one is taking the actual domain.
I seriously doubt that they would prosecute you for doing a review on Pez dispensers. However, they might come after you if you did an inflammatory Anti-Pez Site (don't use logos!!). If you had gobs of money and a good lawyer you could probably beat the case based on "Freedom of Press" as long as your site wasn't too elementary.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
instead of having pez in your meta tag just put metapez in your tag. then we put a button on serch engines that says click here meta search.
if you click on the button, it will put the word meta in front of your search words. then you click on search and then the pez company will never come up.
just a thought.
-- john
If a company's lawyers publish a document saying "You may not foo", but foo is actually perfectly legal, have they done something wrong in the eyes of the law?
I believe that if the company actually sues me for fooing, but fooing isn't illegal *and the company lawyers knew it* there are serious repercussions to the company and/or its lawyers, personally.
If there isn't a lawsuit, but merely the threat of one, what does the situation look like then?
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
First, does the HTML have to be interpreted, or could this get someone sued:
If so, who?
PS. Sorry if I just got you guys sued.
PPS. One more question.. in my above example, whoever gets sued, would it be on 4 different incidents?
Would be a moot point if 10,000 slashdotters put this tag in their sites:
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. [H.S.T.]
I think you've got a very weird definition of "most people"
---
Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )
Commercial sites are, understandably, upset by this. Attempts to subvert search engines, or trick stray surfers, is becoming a popular trick. Not just by prawnographic sites, either. Rival commercial companies have been known to do this, too, to boost their own audiences at the expense of competitors.
Deep linking, deceptively similar domain names, use of copyright material, use of trademarks, etc, are all popular abuses of the Internet by people after a fast buck. That some commercial sites are saying "hey! get your own audience!" is far from surprising. IMHO, it's more surprising they aren't fighting back with even dirtier tactics, such as DOS, injecting false router entries, injecting false DNS entries, etc. The original offenders are unlikely to be able to trace it, and wouldn't want to stir up too much interest, lest their own abuse become visible.
Legal tactics and legal threats are unlikely to have much impact, though. No bite. The possible punishment is insignificant, compared to the profits made. Even if taken to court, the culprits can't lose, in the big picture. When companies realise this, it's entirely plausable that retaliation WILL start to take over as the way company execs handle web pirates.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So basically they want pez.com to be the only site that comes up for a hit on a web search. Someone's looking to lose some friends.
(although I wish is was a bit easier to get to 'official homepages' of products/companies etc.)
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Uh oh. Here come the suits. Help me! Aaaaarrruuuggghhhh!!!!!!
Face it. Microsoft can say that they claim your first born in the Windows EULA. They can write anything they want in there. It's their sheet of paper. Leagally binding? Heck no! Companies do not write law. Is it illegal to defeat the region coding scheme on DVD players? I'm sure Sony, et. al., would say yes. Does it void Sony's warranty? Oh heck, yeah, it's their warranty. Is it illegal? Not in the slightest. Companies do not write law. Companies, given the chance, I'm sure, would love to exert draconian control over the end user and make all sorts of wacky rules and legislation and spell out harsh punishments. Last time I checked, though, no company is classified as a soverign nation (and if so, I do not live within their borders), so we may safely ignore their rules, because they're mere wishes. Rules they are not.
I said most businesses, not most people.
-- Virtual Windows Project
I shall go one further and trademark int, char, and the phrase, ".h".
or pez in hex ascii?
or pez in octal ascii?
or pez encryped, like "the"
unicode pez?
pez in klingon, again in unicode?
Gimme a break. The world has gone completely insane.
You think that's bad? Some German 'entreprenuer' has trademarked the use of the @ symbol! Check out the link. (Babelfished, alas, the original German is here - it's be nice if a German reader could give more details...)
IANAL.
As I understand it, for it to be illegal in UK law, it must be shown that the user is genuinely trying to confuse people about their identity with regard to the trademark in question.
If I produce candy similar to the PEZ product, and then put PEZ in the meta tags there is probably some grounds for prosecution, since I am hoping to fool some people into thinking I sell genuine PEZ.
If I run a (commercial) site about market penetration of various candy products, and put trademarks like 'mars' 'PEZ' 'polo' 'smarties' in my metatags - that's probably OK.
And of course a private non-profit site should be pretty safe.
In all cases you'd probably need to acknowledge the trademark ownerships.
-----
There is a case Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Calvin Designer Label where the court ruled that Calvin could not use Playboy in its metatags. The court's decision suggests that metatags may constitute infringement even though they are invisible to a viewer of the infringing user's web site.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Quick searches for "Pez" at Lycos, Altavista and Google yield a number of private pages by Pez fans and dispenser collectors ("PEZheads") -- "What's New in the World of Pez", "Dale's House of Pez", "Planet Pez", "Museum of Pez Memoribilia" and on and on. There's dozens of them. That's not too surprising -- any hobby, no matter how weird, has got a home page somewhere. And a lot of these pages have "pez" in the Meta-tags.
I am astonished at the idea that Pez might actually prosecute these people. I can't see how they'd have a case, since they're not appropriating the term to sell a product, they're just using it to help the other PEZheads find them. The problem, of course, is that when you get a threatening letter from a lawyer, you're going to have to fight back at great expense, or cave in.
But worst of all, these are people who like this company and buy its products! "Prosecute to the full extent of the law", they say. They're threatening to ruin their most loyal customers, on legal grounds that may be wholly spurious! There may be a worse way for a company to shoot itself in the foot, but right now I can't think of any. Imagine the David v. Goliath stories in the press about a stunned PEZhead under attack from the company he thought he loved. Have these people lost their minds?
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
From what little I could decipher, it looks like their intent is to have a tool they can use to stop the Pez traders and speculators if they want (some of those folks can give the manufacturer a bad name by misrepresenting themselves or screwing customers) - and taking them off the web is a handy way to do so. But they are going about it in a brain-damaged way by trying to paint the whole web with this brush. Their policy also has the effect of (in theory) banning fan sites, legitimate dealers of Pez, reviewers, and news sites from mentioning the name. Trademarks can, AFAIK, be policed for appropriate usage, and precedent has been made on the issue of META tags (thanks to Playboy, if I recall), but Pez's policy goes overboard and would be likely to get smacked down in court.
When it comes to trademarks, I believe it goes something like this:
Referring to Xerox as a copier company: OK
Talking about "making xeroxes of that paper": BAD (Xerox is a trademark, not a term - the "correct" reference would be to "making copies")
Putting "Xerox" as a META tag in your page: Gray area - but probably not OK
Writing about Xerox (the company or the products)in your website: OK!
Selling Xerox products over the web, by name: Probably OK, depending on your reseller agreement and if it allows Net sales by your company. Definitely OK if you have no agreement but have the products.
Substitute "Pez" for Xerox above and you're pretty close to an AUP for Pez as well (except it would sound weird to say "I'm going to go down and make some pezzes of this report", wouldn't it?)
I've got a feeling Pez is in for a bit of a Net spanking...
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I would think that this type of lawsuit would be better covered under deceptive advertising statutes and not trademarks. PEZ
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
53579 documents found - 0.0040 seconds search time
Compaq's popular insight manager server monitoring software uses the .PEZ file extension for the product database which contains info on the latest driver, firmware etc. Is this trademark enfringement as well? Is it really trademark violation if these three letters are used in an entirely different context? If so, I'm going to trademark ABC and sue all the children's book companys I can find!
Pez must think this will cut down on the occurance of sites with meta tags that say: /. now breaking the law too?
Porn Porn Pez Candy Pez Porn Porn Rob Lowe Run DMC Naked Girls
etc.
By the way, here's a website that's breaking the law:
http://www.pezheads.org/
Here are the meta tags:
<META name="description"
content="Shockwave games, non-java chatroom, PEZHead Locator, over 1700 dispensers for sale,
PEZ facts, PEZ pictures, PEZ forum, Price Guide w/Photos,
and SO much more! The LARGEST pez site, anywhere!">
<META name="keywords"
content="Shockwave games, non-java Chatroom, PEZHead Locator, Shopping List
PEZ Polling Booth, PEZ pictures, pez for sale, PEZ Price Guide, PEZ pictures,
PEZ FAQ, new dispenser, PEZ forum, One Stop PEZ Shop, Flip Me Some PEZ">
Is
When people start abusing the rules, it is time to start enforcing these using any means possible. ...
And that's exactly what they are doing
Given that this is obvious bravo sierra (but not far enough over the top to support a "just a joke, folks" defense), does it constitute some form of fraud to publish the statement as a legal advisory?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I'n guessing this would also apply to XML tags.. ;-P Hopefully, that PEZ Collectors shop didn't want to create an XML interface to their sales system.. DoH!
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I don't. If you use programs such as Netscape, Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Pegasus, Hotmail, NetAddress, and others, you have the ability to read HTML mail. And 99% of the time it comes shipped as on.
Only if you are using a very old e-mail client, say more then 2 years, you are not going to be able to read HTML mail.
I don't know if that can sue you. I doubt it at all.
/. article and ran to management... while they call attorneys I investigated on Mexican Trademark Law (and Copyright).
I'm actually developing a site for a fishermen's cooperative in northern Mexico. Most of their product is exported to US... I use a explicit "pez PEZ fish" yada, yada, yada, META tag.
I just read the
Mexican law explicity states that you "...can not trademark or otherwihse copyright any common word or phrase... unless tied to a specif product... in a country where that word or phrase is protected by a trademark"
And that makes sense... a lot.
Things like the 'You got male' are matter of common sense here: you can't trademark or copyright 'Tienes correo!' (You have mail) and even less "Tienes coreo!" (You have chorus).
I can use "Deliciosa y refrescante" (delicious and refreshing) as long as it's not a soda... and so on.
So their trademark is protected by NAFTA as long as I try to sell candies, and nothing else since PEZ is a common word in Spanish.
And for other Spanish speaking countries, I suppose that you can use it depending on:
1. Their own laws.
2. Commercial agreements.
3. Your attorney skills.
Anyway, my client attorneys are now aware of that... and gladly waiting for a long, long, trial ("let's teach those gringo lawyers something about international trademarks") and marketing people are gladly saying 'any publicity is good publicity... let's make some frontheads... Can you put also "store" ahead un the meta tag? We have a store where we actually sell fish') .
I can agree that US (almost) rule the world... but if US lawyers pretend to run the world... then you, the common citizens will have to teach us how to survive those silly guys.
In this case, it was very clear: a couple of accesses from mumble.etrade.com followed shortly afterwards by accesses from mumble.lgslaw.com. Pretty obvious. So he got in there the first time. But unlike dolphins, sharks are rather stoopid animals, and this one didn't think about saving the page to disk. So he had to come back the next day for further reference, but by then all booby traps were in place! It was amusing to watch how during a week various IPs from their office tried to access the page one after the other, and none succeeded. The best part was by the end of that week when they recursively snarfed all pages from the box (a school) where I hosted those pages. They got megabytes and megabytes of data... except for the items that they were looking for (I had sharkproofed only the interesting pages). I still giggle at the thought of having a couple of tie-wearing landsharks sifting through hundreds of kid's homepages, hoping to find some mysterious holy grail. Hehe ;-) There were a few more attempts the next two weeks, and then they finally gave up.
This is just a load of crap. Anyone may freely comment on the business practices of Pez Candy, Inc., even using their logo and _certainly_ the word "PEZ". This is regulated by the Berne Convention on copyrights and immaterial ownership, signed by most countries (including the U.S.) in 1905.
Notably, the same convention causes copyright marks to be completely unnecessary. I don't know why this practice has lived on in the U.S. -- probably a lawyer billage thing.
To clarify: anybody may use a company's name and logo in reviews-comments about that company, as long as the review-comment is not made for profit.
Dick
Here is what I sent to pez@pezcandy.com
Sirs/Madams/PezDispensers:
In RE: http://www.pez.com/HTML/Legal.html
PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ
PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ
PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ
PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ
PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ
PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ PEZ
I BCC'ed this message to 1,000 people.
My lawyers await hearing from your lawyers.
You need to spend less money on legal schmucks like the ones who wrote your disclaimer, and more money fixing up that lame website.
who ever heard of a web store where you have to print out an order form and snailmail it? that is so 1992. get a clue.
Oh, and contrary to your legal schmucks opinion, the contents of this message are the sole property of the author, and may not be reprinted or used to create derivative works or any other use without prior express written consent from the author.
I'll let ya all know when the papers are served...
======
"Cyberspace scared me so bad I downloaded in my pants." --- Buddy Jellison
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Today's story in the NY Times (free account, yadda yadda) on Dirty Tricks on the web has a whole section on Meta Tag tricks and talks about Playboy suing a number of sites who have spammed thier meta tags with the word "playboy" to increase traffic from search engines.
The article makes some other interesting points, although it seems to be geared for the "non-techies."
It's perfectly legal, and a common tactic, to threaten to sue other people, even if your legal basis is shaky. If they actually did sue, then in some jurisdictions they might be fined for a frivolous lawsuit. That's not likely in this case, though, since the web is still in the legal wilderness. If your own lawyer lied about the law you could sue them for malpractice, but the opposition is not bound by that rule.
Our legal system is adversarial; never accept legal advice from the other side's lawyers. They will twist and spin everything to their advantage.
This whole thing is the legal equivalent of guard dogs barking at you because you got too close to the fence.
Do I have to change my dogs name?
Hello! I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die
In Spanish, pez means fish (and has two other lesser meanings) so if I do a website about fishing or aquaria, I will use pez in the metatags, as it is not the pez(R) trademark but a common word instead.
What if I put "que lindo pez", what a nice
fish in spanish, in my web site in Argentina.
There are going to sue me, by using a normal
spanish world ?.
OverLord
Title says all. Will they sue spanish fishing and sea sites ? Maybe I should trademark words like hum... bread, word, letter, pen, fork, table, bed, chair... and threaten people afterwards. AC.
First of all, WTF is an "unregistered trademark?". How can you know if you're violating an unregistered trademark or not? Maybe someone could clear up what they mean by this - but it sounds like nonsense.
Secondly, the point of trademark law is to stop company B passing itself off as company A by using the same or a similar name. So if your company has spent the last twenty years making "Miracle Widgets" and has gained a great reputation, you would be entitled to take action against a new company called "Miracles Widgets" who might be trying to pass themselves off to customers as you. On the other hand, your reputation as a widget maker would be irrelevent to, say, advertising, so "Miracle Advertising Consultancy" would probably not be considered to be passing off.
If I create a "Widget World" web site for discussion and news on the widget industry, I am perfectly at liberty to use the name of Miracle Widgets, even though it's a trademark, as long as there's no way someone looking at the site would think that my site was actually run by Miracle Widgets. It's this right that allows news sites, fan sites, etc, etc to exist. Just think how long ZDnet would last if they weren't allowed to use any trademarked names.
So the question is this; does trademark law in the US, either in statute or precedent, go beyond this simple protection of a business's name from any unscrupulous competitors who might try to deceive the public?
If it does, it's broken.
I fully appreciate that the law probably is much more complex than that. But it shouldn't be.
Let's assume for the moment that the law upholds the above principles, but doesn't go any further. (Laws that don't go far enough are a bad thing; laws that go too far are generally worse.) Let's look at the meta tags issue.
If I have a site which regularly discusses Miracle Widgets, then it would be entirely appropriate to use "Miracle" in the meta tags - the site would be a source of information about Miracle Widgets. As long as I don't actually try to sell people widgets, I'm fine.
Note that this doesn't mean I can't make money from the site. It doesn't matter if it's commercial or non-commercial. I'm allowed to discuss Miracle Widgets on the site in good or bad terms, as often as I like, as long as I never attempt to make them think I *am* Miracle Widgets. It's up to a court to decide whether I am engaging in legitimate discussion, or whether I'm trying to deceive the public. Simply using the word "Miracle" does not place me in breach of trademark.
Having a site which discusses Pez Candy is not in breach of their trademark unless I try to pass myself of as Pez Candy. I can set up a trading site for Pez Candy. I can write good or bad things about it. I can make money out of doing so. As long as I don't infringe their trademark (which means a lot more than just using the word) there's nothing they can do about it.
Does the law work this way? If not, why not? Doesn't it seem remarkably... fair?
Finally, the landsharks give up, and present a huge bill for all that wasted time to Pez.
Farfetched? Wishful thinking? Not at all. I personnally managed to keep E*Trade's lawyers busy during almost three weeks using such silly games until they finally gave up.
Ok, well.. Maybe it's just a little too early in the morning for rational thought, but would you care to explain that a little further? It's not making a lot of sense to me at the moment.
What do you consider to be a "legitimate" word? As in, a "not made up" word? Like, what, girl? Girl is a word, and I'm sure a search for that word would yield more than just a couple of porn sites. Besides, are you really subjected to the porn itself during a search on a search engine (well, on Google I mean.. Yahoo! is more annoying)?
Besides which, what do you mean by the "idea behind" it? That it's a good idea to sue every site under the sun for misreprenting themselves through "inappropriate" usage of keywords in their meta tags? Did it recently become a crime to lie? If so, I would like to state for the record that I am the richest man in the world, not Bill Gates. So, send me to jail now?
And no, this time I'm not trying to flame. I'm geniunely and completely boggled . Someone care to explain.. politely?
~ Kish
IIRC, there has been lots of reference to this recently. If a company holds a trademark and don't pursue _every_ "alleged unlawful" use of it, then they can't pursue _any_ of them . . .
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Someone at Pez, Inc. finally got word of how eBay grew out of Pierre Omidyar helping his girlfriend sell her Pez collection on the web. Since then, in the late twentieth century's version of the tulip craze, eBay has a market cap larger than $20 billion (as large as all of Hershey, Nabisco, Keebler, and Wrigley combined), with Omidyar's personal holdings amounting to something like $5 billion. So, obviously, the next time somebody tries to launch a multi-billion dollar empire based on a Pez dispenser, their lawyers will be ready to take their cut.
You all may want to check out this link... http://www.searchenginewatch.com/resources/metasui ts.html It has some good info RE: meta tags and and lawsuits. The company I work for has seen our competitors use our trademarked name within they're meta tags in the hopes of trying to capture our traffic and to place higher on search engines. It may not matter to review sites but it definitely causes a problem when people try and snipe your customers away by using the name you've built. Over the hub, Through the switch, Around the firewall...Nothing but 'Net
I suppose a company like Metacrawler ought to copyright the use of the META tag. And what about HREF inc? I bet they're going to be way pissed :)
Can your IM do this?
How many web sites do you that sells fish? (even spanish ones)
Mounting jig did not make itself at all the trouble to sketch its own "@"-character.
PINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm a member of an online gaming clan called 'PEZ' (which is an acronym). If meta-tags are forbidden to contain the 3-letter string "PEZ", I wonder what they would say about a domain name! (www.enjoy-pez.com) ;-)
Last year, the idiots in Congress passed a little gem called the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act" to implement the WIPO treaty.
Among a number of other stupid and unnecessary corporate giveaways, the Act criminalized defeating "any technological protection measure which effectively protects a right of a copyright owner". The word "effectively" is carefully redefined from its normal meaning to include basically any protection, no matter how easily defeated.
Since region coding protects certain distribution rights under license, there's little question that defeating region coding is illegal under this (idiotic) law. It's also illegal to create or distribute any technology capable of defeating the coding.
Have a nice day.
Here is my approximate (TM) translation.
(5.10.99) The editors had a great laugh. Six months ago, Volker Jungbluth, opportunities-contributor to the industry periodical C'T, wanted to deny the internet world the phrase "Site Promotion". Editors could report on the best way to publicise a web page only using a "TM" after the phrase.
Despite being ignored by the internet community, it was an issue for web [content?] providers. Some companies advertising on the web using phrases like "webspace", "explorer" or "site-promotion" were mercilessly threatned, often by the notorious Munich lawyer Gravenrueth.
Today a new absurdity came across the editors' desk: the 43year old entrepeneur from Cologne Norbert Helling stated through his lawyer Hans-Jürgen Amend that the @-sign had patent protection for printed products. Attached was a copy of "Design patent book 12", dated 25.6.1999
In this, Hellig didn't even bother to design a single @-sign. The patent description concerned a letter in the font "Times". The figure is described as "letter a". Our lawyer will have a look at the documentation. We will keep you up to date on the soundness of potential warnings from this.
In fact, the so-called legal docuement doesn't just try to forbid use of 'meta' tags. It tries to totally exclude certain phrases from the English language:
IANAL, but I'm sure that this is unenforceable bullshit. You can mention any trademark, as long as you acknowledge the owner (eg, Pez is a trademark of Pez Corporation). You just can't make a similar product under the same name. (In the UK, you can't make a dissimilar product if consumers might be confused or it's thought that you're trading on the name - eg yesterday the Trade Marks Registry prohibited the sale of 'Visa' condoms.)
Given that they stick in a lot of rubbish about not mentioning their trademarks, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that their prohibition of 'meta' tags is also without legal weight. (Again, IANAL.)
Besides, you never signed that document - you don't have to abide by its terms.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What are they going to do, sue us all?
--JT