I have a business site that provides a service for Twitter.com The domain includes the word Twitter Could i get in any trouble for this? The owner of a similar site that had "Twitter" in the domain was contacted by Twitter and was threatened if he did not sell the domain itself to them, he would be taken to court. He did as told and sold the domain and transferred his site to a new domain. Any input?
They can sue you for all the money you have and are legally allowed to make you work as their slave if you are unable to pay.
But twitter is appellative word... I can find it in dictionary. So in court you can state that it's not their brand name used - you just created nice website about your bird Something like that...
If you mean using Twitter for the site twitter.com, then yes you can have problems for trademark infringement. That is using their trademark without permission. I suggest you to ask their written permission. If this is the case, explain you have a service to enhance their website and you would like to get the written permission to use their name. Otherwise, you can use yoursite.com/twitter-service/ as the URL and you should not have problems.
You can ask them. It will cost you nothing and can save you from a lot of trouble. But to be frank with you, I doubt they can win a law suite for that if you have some kick ass lawyers.
Ok hopefully this will clear up this matter. Twitter is a TM just like Google and has been registered by twitter.com. You can hold a domain name that contains the word twitter if you are making a site that has nothing to do with twitter.com as the word is registered in the dictionary as a national word. The only way you could get into trouble and is best to check with twitter is if you are making a site that has something to do with twitter.com and that has twitter in the domain name. -Z-
I can't stand morons who post in the legal section. He is using the website and domain for a Twitter.com related service. Telling him to argue in court that it is a site about birds is illogical, pointless, and simply untrue.
Hahah, he wouldn't say... he said Twitter required him to keep it confidential. Although he did say it was a fair amount.
you can have any domain you want. And even if they do try to sue you - by what you said, you may get some money out of it. So whats the problem? I say do it.
My wife is a lawyer and she is on the side of the big corp : she is fighthing people like you everyday, including legal ways to retrieve back for free the domain name for her customer. Anyway, it can take a long time and sometimes she agrees to just refund the registration fee to the original owner. If you have this twitter domain name and your activity is twitter related, you might think of another domain name and just ask them if they want to retrieve your domain or if you can continue like this.