hey some one email me about my site unblockgmail.com and I wanted to see if this is a violation of there tm or anything? Are there any legal problems i may run into? Thanks for the help.
Was it google? If not, you will get an email from them for using one of their trademarks in your domain name. One, you can not have adsense ads on any domain using one of their trademarks! So eliminate all adsense at once. Two, they may get pissy about you using a direct link into their sign up pages, thus bypassing their own pages, etc.
no it wasn't google it was one of my friends who is a moderator at the proxy.org forums. So your saying that it would be legal, for say if i used the term gemail instead of gmail?
Phonetic and similar spellings can be trademark infringement. No one can tell you that using a certain name will mean you will not have someone claiming your name is infringing upon their trademark. There is a possiblity that google will have a problem with gemail. If they do, they will send you a C&D letter requesting that you stop. If you continue, they can sue you. You could then get an attorney and fight them. Legal fees would be tens of thousands of dollars, and even if you won, you don't get your attorney fees. While a company can automatically sue you for damages without giving you a chance to stop using the name, google isn't likely to be one of those. You have to decide if you want to build a name that you might lose. If you don't care about losing the domain name you built, then you could go ahead and use the name and hope you never hear from a trademark holder.
Actually that isnt true (too my knowledge), they must first send you some sort of correspondence, they usually send an email first and then follow that up with certified mail if they dont hear from you.
Not with a Federally Registered trademark. You are expected to check for any prior usage, and a Federal Registration removes the argument that you didn't "know". As I said, most companies are going to contact you first - but not in cases of outright infringement. If they had to contact you before they could claim damages, you could have people selling items using the "Microsoft" trademark and then just stop when they are notified and keep all the money. They could then create another company and do it all over again. If you infringe upon a trademark, you can be sued for damages and any income you generated - plus treble legal fees. There is no requirement that you first be contacted. Same with copyright infringement. If you use a celebrity photo taken from a fan site, you can be sued for a usage fee with no prior contact to take the image down. Even if you bought a site and had been told they had rights to use the photo, or a designer you hired used a photo without permission, or purchased a CD from someone who said their were usage rights to use the pictures, the site owner is responsible for content on the site and cannot argue they didn't know. They are legally responsible for paying a usage fee and damages. The celebrity isn't likely the one who is going to sue you, but the photographer or agency who actually owns the rights to the photo.
True. You bear a strict liability and not one based upon whether or not you had knowledge. However, just because gmail is a registered trademark of Google for providing an Internet email service doesn't mean that gmail can't be used for other services. In fact, gmail is a registered trademark of several other people as well and trademarks can be registered in different "classes" or types of usage, e.g. the Gmail TV Dinners. Note that many big companies will try to intimidate you with the threat of an expensive lawsuit to give away your domain when no rights truly exist. Note also that unless you're making it worth their while, for the most part they won't waste their time on you.
That's can be true, but there are also well known companies who have broad trademark protection and almost any use of the mark in a domain name is going to be infringement. You can't register "apple-ipod.com and then put content about something else on the site. The domain name alone is enough to create confusion to the visitor. If you checked the url given, there is no doubt the url being talked about is in the same classification/about the registered trademark.
True. Use the word "monster" in any name and you'll get sued by the Monster Cable company. Take a look at job board monster.com. They are the best example of going overboard to the point of giving lawyers a bad name. Do a search on them and you may never buy Monster cables again, lol. I don't (but that's mostly because they are WAY overpriced and not worth the money for the branding and advertising!)
k thanks for the help i emailed google about this issue and am waiting for a response. Thanks for the help.
Actually Google can't sue you for using the term "gmail". They are actually the ones being sued to hand over gmail.com, that is why they are starting to use googlemail.com instead. Peace,
That's not exactly true. There are trademark disputes all the time. Space.com is suing myspace.com but that doesn't mean myspace is going to lose or that myspace won't sue you. In fact, they have filed several federal lawsuits. There is nothing preventing google from suing anyone using the term in a way that infringes upon their mark.