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Trademark infringement - Q & A

Kenesia from Denver calls in to ask Craig about trademark infringement and his experience with it.

Rich Sloan: Welcome to the show, Kenesia.

Kenesia:  Hi.  Thank you so much for your information and your guest.  I've learned so much from you every week.

Rich Sloan:  Right on.  Do you have a comment or a question for us today?

Kenesia:  I have a question, and then I wanted to also see if I could do your elevator pitch.

Rich Sloan:  Absolutely.

Kenesia:  Yeah.  Well, my question is for Craig, if he's run into any trademark infringement problems.  You know, if I wanted to advertise with you, or just, you know, anything in that nature?  Have you run into that or --

Craig Newmark:  We've run into it in two different flavors.  For the most part, some -- well, sometimes people try to use a trademark similar to our name, and we have a trademark just to protect ourselves, and we have had to send very gentle letters to people, asking them not to get too close in terms of name or function of what we do.

And once in a very long while someone will post an ad on our site using someone else's trademark, and again, a gentle reminder is helpful.  In general, reasoning with people usually works, but not always.

Kenesia:  Right.  And I'm wondering if that means, like, they're using it in their search engine as a key or term?

Craig Newmark:  Yeah.  In that case, like, some people have used our name to draw attention to their site.

Kenesia:  Right.

Craig Newmark:  Which one might question the ethics of, but so far it appears to be legal, but I think there's at least one court case on that going on right now.

Kenesia:  Right.  Because I've run into that already, and I'm just a baby business, and my name has already been taken as a I guess, a meta tag, and, you know, you put in my name and it brings them to their website.

Rich Sloan:  That's a tough business, isn't it, and that's a common problem.  People essentially are meta tagging terms that scoop up traffic out there and drop people into their site.

Kenesia:  Right.  And I'm trademarked, you know.  There's just nothing -- and I've sent letters of cease and desist, but you know, it's the primary name of my business, but not the dominant, so --

Craig Newmark:  Okay.

Kenesia:  -- that's why they're getting away with it.

Craig Newmark:  You might get some help from the ISP or hosting service of the guys who are pulling this.  About half of the hosting services will respond to something.  They'll see there's something straightforward, and they'll help you out.  But that's not every time.

Kenesia:  Right.

Craig Newmark:  It's maybe half the time.

Kenesia:  Right.

Rich Sloan:  But sometimes they do that, and it's kind of, like, a slapping of the hand of the people who are doing those -- let's call them unethical business practices.  Right?

Kenesia:  Right.

Craig Newmark:  Yeah.  And like right now I'm working on getting some scammers shut down, but they'll just go to another ISP later, but it's progress.