News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A Conference Stole My Identity. Parent comment

Re:A Conference Stole My Identity by jahewson on Thursday July 24, 2014 @01:36PM (#8080995)
No. The same wordmark, e.g. "ACME" may have hundreds of registered owners, each for a specific business activity: perhaps a company in Florida sells ACME burgers and a company in California runs an ACME carwash. These companies do not have any claim on the domain name unless somebody is misusing their trademark by pretending to be them or trading off their name while performing the same business activity.

A registered trademark should not prevent somebody from continuing a usage which they were engaged in first, before the trademark was registered. If the business activities overlap then the registration itself should be rejected, if not it is likely to be invalid and can be challenged.

I don't believe that the business activities of is guy and the developer conference are sufficiently similar, I doubt he has any recourse, nor should he have expected any.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Conference Stole My Identity by dreamfactory2 on Thursday July 24, 2014 @02:20PM (#8081261)
He doesn't need to be actively passing off. They just need to demonstrate confusion in the mind of the consumer, which he has already conveniently done for them here.

You do raise the very relevant point that tlds don't equate to trademark categories and that in a more just world domains should therefore be out of reach until the laws catch up with this.

[ Parent | on HN ]