I am curious if anything can be done about this. Lets say if i owned domain name called www.producepro.com which i registered and started to operate. Shortly, another site comes up called www.producepros.com also doing the exact same business as you. Is there anything that can be done about this?
Not really. Just make your site better, and beat him. You should have registered anything that closely resembles your domain, that you didn't want to fall into the wrong hands. There are thousands of similar sites all over the internet. Unless you have legal protection of , identity, Processes, and copyrights on content, unfortunately, that is the name of the game. I'll bet everyone here can name a site off the top of their head that is in their same niche or closely similar to their own. Can Gateway sue Dell for making computers? Could Ford have sued GM for making automobiles, and calling them automobiles?
No, but Macdonald's can probably sue MacRonald if someone ever made one. Anyway without a registering a trademark for like 400 dollars theres basically notthing you can do. Thats what i'm gettiing.
Ha. Did you ever see "Coming to America" with Eddie Murphy, and Arsenio Hall? Remember "McDowell's"? That's what you just reminded me of
ultimately it depends what countries you are both in etc (both in terms of testing if they are doing anything wrong and also for each countries law) but if you were in the UK then there certainly would be an argument for passing off (ie trying to get business as a result of people mistaking them for yourselves) for which legal solutions can be found. Could always be worth getting a solicitor/ lawyer to send a cease and desist letter to them - but make sure it is a solicitor/ lawyer that sends it as the writing it yourself and putting "legal department" at the bottom can be spotted a mile off.
In response to your posting and as the owner and creator of ProducePros.com, I would like to address your question "What can be done". First of all, I've been in the staffing & recruiting business since 1992 and purchased this domain name in 2000 (also own producepros.net). Secondly, from what I can see from your website, we are not in the same line of business and do not "do the same thing". We specialize in sourcing and recruiting talent for the produce industry primarily on the West Coast. You provide software solutions to the produce industry. I am sorry if this similarity in web addresses is an issue and I'd be more than happy to discuss this with you. Perhaps we could exchange a link? A positive resolution would certainly seem to be the answer. Let's work together!! I'd be more than happy to refer people to you should someone contact us by mistake looking for ag software. BTW, to date this has not happened to my knowledge. Hope this helps. Please feel free to reach me at robyn@projobs4u.com. robyn darosa
Robyn, Thanks for dragging up an old posting from the depths. I'm not sure you will ever read this, but if you do.... With a little bit of research and careful reading of the post it was pretty easy for me to determine that the original poster was not referring to a domain that he actually owns. He used those particular examples not because he owns one of them, nor because the scenario that he describes is true of these two businesses. He used those sites because he felt that the domain names clearly illustrated the question that he wanted an answer to without revealing any of the domains that he owns. Many people do not use their actual domains when asking questions here. The reason may be that they do not want to let people know about a niche that is making money for them (as this leads to people jumping on the band wagon and less money for each person in the niche). Another reason is that some people don't want to give up personal information. A third reason is that they don't want their competitor to find the post through Google and alert their competition to what they are contemplating. Suffice it to say, there are many reasons people use fictitious examples. Why did I suspect this was the case? Like you, I read his intial post and yours and realized that the two sites aren't even in the same ballpark, much less industry. That and my general knowledge of the site made me feel that this was likely just an example, not an actual case. So, how did I determine this to be the case? I used the search feature to find previous posts by the original author. I located one where he was selling some domains. I did a whois on some of the domains the OP was selling and a whois on the domains in this thread. The whois of producepro.com indicates it was registered in 1996 (not recently like the original post would suggest) by a different business in a different country than the domains the thread starter owned. I guess this a long way of telling you that, in this case, nobody is trying to threaten your website.
Thank you for the clarification. Interesting... it appeared to be a recent posting, but glad you took the time to clear up the misunderstanding. Guess I am very frank and upfront and still believe that most others are as well.
Whether anything can be done about this type of similarity in a website depends upon whether you have a registered trademark in the domain name. If you have it trademarked and the copy-cat website was registered after your trademark was registered then you should be able to file for arbitration with an ICANN approved provider and wrestle the name away. If you do not have a registered trademark it would be much harder. If the other website were registered first it would be impossible. -Gene