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[ClaireH-184886]

Hi can anyone help me. I am trying to track information from sites. I am at the moment got solicitiors involved ref trade mark of a name and we are trying to prove that this name was being used before the trade mark application.

A company has gone ahead with a trade mark in full knowledge that this is a common name and we have been told if we can prove that the name was being used before it was registered then we can knock out the trade mark.

We have been told there is an internet archive but i cannot find one, can anyone please let me know how i can look at sites from before 2010 and see about if they were using this word to help our case.

[ClaireH-184886]

Thanks for that. This guy is very slippery and it is bad news that he is allowed to get away with stuff. Our legal team have said that because we have no proper proof  of him attacking our site although they and we know what he is doing, we cannot take him to court. We are trying to see if we can take him to court for false alligations to our hosting company because he gave his name to them. But with other companies he has been using different names.

This is costing us thousands of pounds and it seems we are getting no nearer to stopping him or sorting it out.

We had to change the content on our site because he was copying it and then passing it on as his own and sending it to people who have sites that represent him, so our rankings dropped and while the legal team were sorting it out we took the choice to re write a lot of the content.

There needs to be more guidelines in place to stop all this, but there is some good news as the guy who is trying to off load franchises is getting a bad reputation.

We got into a forum that is just meant for his franchisee people and we got in by just registering and found he was calling our company and making recommendations on how to stop us from getting customers and when our legal team made him aware of this, he went mad and said it was wrong of us to be on his forum and he quickly put a lock on it.

It would be nice if this was an honest world

[RyanKent]

If you can imagine Diane, it gets worse.

I have a client who has offered multiple brands for many years, dating back as far as 2002. A distributor whom she sold products to noticed two of the brands were not properly trademarked. The distributor successfully trademarked one brand, and was months into the application process of the second brand when the issue was discovered.

This distributor actually filed a trademark infringement complaint with Google and removed all of my client's advertisements, and then filed a trademark complaint with her host forcing her to remove the products from her store. Once a trademark is actually granted, the process is much harder to address.

To deal with the granted trademark, a formal process called a Cancellation had to be filed. I completed the paperwork and have confidence my client will win eventually, but this distributor actually hired an attorney and clearly intends to drag out the process as long as possible. This entire time he has the benefit of owning the trademark which prevents anyone else from selling or advertising the product. Imagine a product sold by dozens of distributors now only being sold by a single entity. Once the issue is resolved, legal action can be pursued against him, but clearly the type of person to take this action is very shady.

The second trademark was caught in time to where an Opposition notice was filed.

In order to receive the trademark, the applicant had to sign under penalty of perjury a document stating he is the mark's owner and has no knowledge of it's use in commerce by others. Clearly signing that statement was fraudulent and it can be used in a lawsuit, but this is a long process spanning years and should be avoided.

My strongest advice is to always register any marks used in your business, and to monitor the Register where new trademark applications are posted. You need to watch not only for exact matches, but marks which look or sound similar to a mark you own.

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi thanks for that and thank you egol for the website address. It seems a company who has registered this trade mark done so in the full knowledge that it was imoral. It is wrong that the trade mark office is not more widely out there, what i mean is, anyone can secretly register a trade mark in the UK and it seems it is hard to have it stopped.

We have a company who we did not class as our compeditiors as they were not in the same class as us, but because we were getting all the customers coming to us, they were not happy about this and started doing things that were not nice, like trying to reduce traffic to one of our sites, making false aligations, trying to have articles removed from sites, basically i am sure they have a horse in their back garden.

We have now a legal team in place to sort this out, but we have been told that we have to show companies have been using the trade mark name before they registered it, and then it can be dropped. So we are hoping to find these companies and hoping like us that they have been using that name for some time.

It seems terrible that a company can be allowed to do what they have been doing such as attacking our site and trying to cause dead links.

[RyanKent]

Hi Diane.

I would add that trademark law is a complex field. The specific detail which is the deciding factor for a case with an unregistered trademark is "first use in commerce". The use of a term in and of itself is not significant unless there is a clear commercial intent.

The above information is specific to the United States; however, there seems to be a lot of similarity with trademark laws throughout the world.

[EGOL]

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