Trademark Use

I got a "newsletter" from my attorney and found an article on trademark use interesting.

Basically, the courts ruled that a non-commercial use of a trademark on a website does not constitute infringement.

The court held that "the non-commercial use of a trademark as domain name of a website - the subject of which in consumer commentary about the products and services represented by the mark - does not constitute infringement under the Lanham Act."

The court made the rulings because they found the site noncommercial and the use of the trademark was not "In Connection with a sale of goods or services".

Seems to me this opens the door to some serious "revenge" based sites who wish to profess the displeasure with major brands in a major way. Hmmmmmm.....

Anyone else have thoughts on this? Thinking I may have to go buy up all the domains that have my trademarks in them....ouch!

Maybe we should all go buy a domain name with Google in it and optimize the hell out of it for Search Engine or "Google" and profess our collective displeasure with the "Sandbox" and how it's keeping the "Man" down! Seem so long as we don't make money with it, we can kick them in the teeth and got the poor rankings to back it up to....lol

Good you shared this news with us .I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise .
Back to the topic ,I agree on the revenge that is comming ,maybe some lawsuits even ?!

No need to buy every single variation of a domain name that could contain your trademark. Just protect/buy the domains that are specific to your trademark (ie. www.[trademark].com, with as many TLDs as you deem necessary) IMO.

Let the haters hate. If you have a good product with a good service, the malcontents will be seen as such.

lol...yeah...already done that....but didn't buy the other longer names that had fluff in them.

So, I'm gonnna go looking for a "Google" type domain name and beating around the idea of making it a "B*tch" blog.. he

I think i will trademenk the name Gchaney and then you have to pay me every time you use your own name.

lol...I couldn't give ya any luv for crackin me up this morning. If it my name weren't crap, it might not be a bad idea....lol

Strange...as far as im concerned its still infringement.

Maybe you aint using their trademark to gain sales or maybe customers aint got confused into thinking that the site is official so they buy but trademarks and incorporated company names are protected from other people using them.

OK, you can still buy a domain starting with microsoft or google, or whatever....but thats copyright infringement because you are infringing upon their right as you are using their *reserved* word.

I agree thats its less of a case if the sites a non-commercial one then its not nearly half as bad as a commercial one...but what i think this meant at the end of the day is that if you wrote an article on say, Microsoft Windows (both being registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp, probably worldwide) it would be hard for Microsoft to close such an article down via law, same as if you used logos and such like of trademarked content but that of a hate/revenge site not just affects copyright law but go further then that to the extent of stuff like you can sue for lack of business (if it affects you) or for damage of company image etc.

Oh and the Gchaney stuff lol, unless you had it registered worldwide being in the US, you would have to prove that he lives and post content on this site from the US and oh yea..he had the name first