[thelist] Trademarks and web page names
Nick Daverin
ndaverin at marian.org
Wed Apr 8 14:44:31 CDT 2009
For anyone interested in this, our attorney came back to us with an
excerpt of a 2003 decision of a Sixth Circuit Federal Court
(Interactive Products Corporation v. a2z Mobile Office Solutions,
Inc, Brian Lee, Mobile Office Enterprise, and Douglas Mayer) saying
that if there is no consumer confusion regarding the source of the
web page and the source of services offered therein, there can be no
trademark infringement.
He also referenced this page: http://www.netatty.com/trademark.html.
Which also states "Trademarks can appear in portions of the URL other
than the domain name. A subdirectory name can use a trademark, or a
specific file name can contain a trademark. For example, the
fictional URL http://www.netatty.com/pepsi/pizzahut.html would seem
to violate two trademarks. But a federal judge in California has
ruled that such usage is entitled to less protection than domain
names because it is merely descriptive and does not entail the
likelihood of confusion that domain name usage does. (Patmont Motor
Werks Inc. v. Gateway Marine Inc., C-96-2703 (N.D.Cal. 1997). Judge
Thelton Henderson found that the use of the trademark in the URL
constituted “nominative fair use.” Id. The court found that as long
as the content of the page does not lead to confusion about source,
then there is no violation when a server uses a trademark as a
descriptive indicator."
-Nick
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