How protective to be over your brand.
 

I was curious to run this by a few people here who've been at this for longer than I have.

What is your opinion of companies and sites that defend their registered trademarks and try to stop companies from using their name and/or portions of their name? I recognize the questions a little broad...maybe too much so for the forum. I was just curious because I've heard varying opinions from people who think it's a petty thing to do all the way through people that believe if you have a trademark or a copyright you should defend it if it's being infringed upon at all.

Thoughts and comments are appreciated.

we've been proactively buying expiring domains that compliment our trademarks. we use http://pddw.com to find them. protecting your intellectual property is definitely not a petty thing to do.

I agree that protecting your intellectual property is very necessary.

I ask because I've seen threads on this board where people have been upset and trashed companies who bring legal action against other companies/programs/sites that are violating their copyright or trademark.

Personally, I agree that we live in a sue happy world and things should be able to be solved without jumping to that level every time. Unfortunately, it seems like sometimes thats the steps you need to take for some of these programs to get the message.

Well Ben put yourself in their shoes. Just imagine working hard, building up kickass for a few years.($ in banners, designs, all types of branding) Then someone trys to beast of your work with kickbutt...chances are you wouldn't want to buy the guy a drink

Maybe I didn't do a great job explaining myself with my last post. We are actually the company that has spent 12 years building up our brand and we have some new kids on the block who are doing some things we are not so fond of.

sounds like a case for Paul Berra @ http://Berra.org

Just do like Hustler, "This is NOT Star Trek XXX"

"This is Not INSERT TRADEMARK NAME" and you good to go!

Violating or using to promote?

See here's the interesting thing, its WIDELY known that SERPs keywords is the most sought after traffic period. So I beat you to the punch or you drop the ball on registering your domain in .net/.org etc etc. Then, I do a better job at optimizing a site for keywords in the domain and rank higher than the site i'm promoting... let's remember that MY JOB and the one i'm good at is TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT, I don't need to worry about all the hassles of running a paysite.. I just need to work on TRAFFIC.

Now is it a trademark violation? Or is it just a greedy dumbass and/or busy paysite owner just trying to cash in on my hard work and instead of profit splitting, just sue me for the domain and hope i'll cave in and push it over to you, complete with SERPs and traffic to boot!

I wonder how many paysite owners have paid the people for their time and traffic - to be honest, instead of blowing a load on lawyers, why not use that to pay off the affiliate first and negotiate. Either way, it's still a slimeball move... especially if the affiliate is promoting your site in good faith. :2 cents:

Oh I like that! My next paysite will be...

"This is NOT PLAYBOY... OR BOYS WHO LIKE TO PLAY...or PLAYS with BOYS and definitely NOT A BUNNY LOGO...."

Good stuff. Ice you in on this? :thumbsup

It just seems funny to me that people start programs with basically no or extremely minimal original content and then feel that they can take the name of a a production company thats been around 12 years.

I work for Kick Ass Pictures our affiliate program is Kick Ass Pays. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out who I am talking about.