Hello, I am going to use an example scenario based on world of warcraft (wow) There is a trademark: World of Warcraft I buy the domain: worldcheats.com On my website, it talks about World of Warcraft cheats, and I sell bots and I make money off of them. Can Blizzard (Owners of Warcraft) sue me? Even though I don't have the trademark in my domain, can they sue me making money off of their trademark on my website? Note: All products/information be my OWN on my website. Any input would be fantastic, thank you!
They cant sue you if you only mention their name... but if you sell your softwares as a blizzard software extension (witch you have to write down if you wish customers to find your site.) The problem is: You try to sell such software that Wow wants to be banned for ever. It will be a natural reaction from them when thousands of users will use your bots to try bring your website down. Sadly, they will win with their professional lawyers. I would advise you to make the software registration and invitation necessary when you reach a few hundred sell. Then it may be harder to find your product and bring it down. But in a long run, you cant win in a legal word. Do not forget: play and leave playing others. Cheers,
That is not what trademarks are for, trademarks are there to make sure you can not post as Blizzard or sell a product called WoW or World of Warcraft. You can sell a bot that you state is for world of warcraft, much like you can sell software what works on Microsoft Windows. However, that is not what you should be conserned about. If you are in a country where they can sue you, they probably will if you get big. When you started using WoW you agreed to their ToS which bans the bots, these bots cause them to loose money (lost clients, bandwidth, processing, ect) and they can sue you for it. If you are in an country where that is hard, they probably wont, but I would be really careful if you are in the states. You might want to familiarize yourself with these legal matters, here is a link for trademark law: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm#1 ps. Its also worth mentioning that you can sue for anything, you just don't always win and they don't have to get money. They can sue you for making the bots without wanting compensation (they would move for the courts to file an injunction), its nothing to them because they have an entire legal department. The same can't be said for you, even going into the first steps of a lawsuit will likely cost you more money than you want to spend.
Look into the fair use provision of th DMCA, make disclaimers on your website saying that there is no affiliation and such to blizzard or WoW.
Thanks for all the responses, I truly appreciate it as I want to play this as legal as possible. ARTidas & EvanP: As your questions are nearly the same, or at least conclude the same at the end, I will answer these together. I will NOT be selling Blizzards products whatsoever. The products that I would be selling would be products that I personally develop, products that the community openly develops as freeware, or I would outsource programmers to actually program them. I have absolutely no intention to steal someones work. As far as the bandwidth issue, I hope to be the number #1 term in google, would get around 10k views a day so there would be a good amount of bandwidth put onto the games servers. However, it's not all about the bots, there would be content to read, etc. Could they come after me if all I do is distribute the product? Also, how would they know how much the bots used in bandwidth? c_programmer, thanks for the information, I read only for the resource you supplied, and I understand that it could certainly be a tough battle even if they are not in the right for attorneys, etc. SamPeterson, thanks for that. I actually noted that on a piece of paper that a lot of websites around this kind of area do in fact have that on the bottom of their page. I'm not sure if that would really hold up in court, or that it's just there to create a "front", would you know if this really holds up in court? Again, I appreciate everyones input/responses. So to conclude: 1. I would be spending a lot of money in legal fees even if they aren't in the right. 2. Bandwidth from the bots may be an issue
1. Yes, but chances are they will sue you for things they are in the right in 2. No, bandwidth will be an issue.
You are an idiot and have no clue about what you are posting. DMCA is for copyright infringement, not trademark infringement. A disclaimer doesn't avoid trademark infringement.