Not long ago I was involved in a company that defended their trademark. The other group said to us 'f- you' and refused to comply. They then continued to do marketing and interviews with our brand name and an almost identical logo. It's like they were trying to dig a hole.
So that behaviour actually just created more evidence of infringement. We contacted their partners and explained the situation and they started pulling their support. They lost half their board members. So eventually their own lawyer said "Hey guys, we really should comply." and that was it.
No money exchanged hands and we only dropped 30k into a lawyer. I assume they sunk money into rebranding, lawyers, new partners, and a whole bunch of things because they were being petty.
No, they don't, only probability of customer confusion.
Criminal counterfeiting charges require intent, IIRC.
> or they could be unintentionally confusing [to the customer]
> Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they do not require intent to mislead.
You are trying to assert that this makes sense and that the second half makes the first half correct. Neither is true.
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The sentence reduces to “trademark violations are considered to have taken place regardless of when there is either an intention to mislead or if a customer was unintentionally misled.”
If the grammar was poop and you can’t make a good faith reading of it (to go so far as to follow me around on this post) then by all means feel free to comment away but I won’t be responding to it.
How do you know unintentional confusion did not occur?
Is this a legal requirement?
The next sentence also goes on to say that either one of those two needs to take place - again, referencing more than one way a trademark violation could take place.
Maybe my English wasn't clear. English isn't my first or my most recent language, so my grammar sometimes goes a bit funky.
The sentence taken as a whole does not make the wrong part right. That you think we must not have noticed the rest of the sentence demonstrates that you don't know why it is wrong. You are choosing to get defensive instead of accepting a correction to your grammar that you acknowledge as being funky.
> Maybe my English wasn't clear.
What is the effective difference between your English being unclear and the correction being written in a way that makes it wrong?
If he was releasing a messenger app called KikAss, then sure, they “must” enforce the Kik trademark.
But if I release a brand of shoes called Kik, with an api that allows users to poll how many steps a user has taken that day, that’s not a trademark violation.
Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they could be unintentionally confusing (for example, if Kik has been talking about releasing shoes for a while or if it’s a well known brand of soccer balls).
Neither of these things have occurred, so the trademark doesn’t have to go through a (futile) enforcement process.