RE: Trademarks

[Robert Frank <bobf@corsearch.com>]

Perhaps the reason no one bothered your brother was because he
had a very legitimate use of his domain name; it was his name.
If my name were Bob Pillsbury and I had a local grocery store,
I suspect I could also get away with calling my store Pillsbury without
having the food giant kill me.  But explain to me why anyone other
than the rightful trademark owner every has the right to register
(whether they use it or not) names such as:

deltaairlines.com
avon.com
lmagnum.com

Robert Frank, President
CORSEARCH, Inc.

(Speaking just for myself as an interested party.)




Marty Modell wrote:

We live in a litigatious society, not only here in the US  but 
anywhere where the citizenry have free access to the courts and where 
the courts are anywhere near impartial.

People are encouraged to sue for all sorts of reasons, for rea and 
imagined slights, infringments on public and private space, for any 
reason at all.  They sue for things that happened yesterday, last 
week, last year back to before they were even born. In most societies 
people have a right to sue, and there is very little you can do to 
stop them. 

They may not win, but they can sue.

Trademarks are words or phrases used by a business to identify 
themselves and their products...  Any word can be used, and any word 
can be made up and used.  

To put a stop to trademark infringement suits means to stop using 
words as part of Domain names.  Most people are reasonable and will 
tary a number of names until they get one they can use.  If you 
doubt that check out the names in use today.  My daughter tried to 
look up the Walmart catalogue and found World something something 
Mart

Was it a legitmate use of the name, probably, would Walmart the store 
have liked the name, probably.

My brother holds modell.com

He has yet to be sued by Art Modell (Baltimore Ravens), Modells 
sporting goods, or any of the other firms that use Modell as part of 
their name.

Could he be sued, yes!  Why hasn't he?  Probably because the potential 
litigators were reasonable people and found some other name to use or 
maybe after theree years they haven't gotten around to it..
Comments
--  
Marty Modell                     e-mail: ir001264@mindspring.com 
      http://www.mindspring.com/~ir001264/Home.htm         
                  author of 
      A Professional's Guide to Systems Analysis
         Second Edition - McGraw Hill - 1996