Help internet archive
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Search google for "internet archive". Click on first result.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will properly encoded & signs hurt or help me?
Hello friends, Will properly encoding a url hurt my ranking after having it improperly coded? I want to change my & symbols to & If I go from:
Technical SEO | | sonic22
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool To:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool Will I get hurt if I make the leap?0 -
Please Help! Crawl & Site Errors - Will This Impact My SEO?
Hello Moz, I need urgent help. I remove a tonne of product pages and put everything into one product page to deal with duplicate content. I thought this was a good thing to do until I got an email from Google saying: "Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on ****.com that return a 404 (not found) error. " I checked it out and found the problem: 4 Soft 404's
Technical SEO | | crocman
41 Not Found's What do I need to do to fix this? Is it a problem or should I just ignore? I removed all the pages on WordPress but I need to do it somehow manually through Google? I have worked so hard on my SERP's that this will destroy me if I'm penalised. Please can someone advise?0 -
We need a bit of help from someone to fix the following issues causing speed issues on our website.
Hi We need a bit of help from someone to fix the following issues causing speed issues on our website.Does anyone know of someone that can help? Reduce server response time Optimize images Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content Avoid landing page redirects Leverage browser caching Minify CSS Minify JavaScript Minify HTML
Technical SEO | | Bev.Aquaspresso0 -
Help! Same page with multiple urls. How is this handled?
I'm using DotNetNuke for many of our sites. DotNetNuke's home page can have multiple VALID URLs that go to the same home page. Example: http://aviation-sms.com http://www.aviation-sms.com http://aviation-sms.com/default.aspx http://www.aviation-sms.com/default.aspx and http://aviation-sms.com/aviationSMS.aspx http://www.aviation-sms.com/aviationSMS.aspx All the above URLs have the same content. In the page header tag, I have: Should I be doing something else? such as removing the "default.aspx"??? I have a blog also that has a boatload of pages. I tried this canonical approach, but I'm not sure SEO Moz likes it and the tool offers me little guidance on this issue.
Technical SEO | | manintights280 -
Looking for someone to help get reconsidered in Google search.
Hi Guys, I need some extra hands and recently got some notifications from Google about unnatural links and this is something I've known about already. I've tried a few times to email webmasters but there is little to no results. I'm looking for some individuals that are great at getting reconsidered to Google. The site I am working on already is being ranked but this is a partial ban. Please PM me your rates and success with previous campaigns. Ideally, I want a flat rate for 100% guarantee reconsideration. TIA!
Technical SEO | | William.Lau0 -
Redirection help to retrieve broken links
Hi, my hosting company after they updated my joomla website lost thousands of pages of content, i am now searching for all broken links and re doing the content to get my links back, but i am having a problem understanding how to redirect these links. For example, i have now managed to retrieve this page http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think but the old url for this page was http://www.in2town.co.uk/Have-Your-Say/Liberal-Dem-Leader-says-He-Will-be-The-Next-Prime-Minister-What-Do-You-Think/menu-id-4953 i do not have the unfriendly url for this page, so what i am trying to find out is, how to tell google that the above page is now http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think in my joomla site. if anyone could please explain how to do this with joomla 1.5 then you will make me very happy as then i will be able to retrieve some of my lost links
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Help with domain redirect advice please!
I run the website http://buildyourjacket.com. We have other domains as well, most importantly www.buildyourjacket.com and cvcsports.com. If you Google "letterman jackets" (our primary search term) cvcsports.com shows up as the first result (yay!). But that is not what we want. Until a few weeks ago, Google would show http://buildyourjacket.com as the domain for the first search result from "letterman jackets". But then a few weeks that changed. I don't know how that could have happened. There are two reasons why we want the domain http://buildyourjacket.com to be the one that shows up: 1) It's a better sounding/looking domain and 2) When it was showing up, Google also showed right below the domain another link of our that said "Build Your Own Jacket" which definitely helped us get more clicks. Can someone please help me and tell me what I should do? Thank you so much.
Technical SEO | | BrandonDoyle0 -
Need Help With Robots.txt on Magento eCommerce Site
Hello, I am having difficulty getting my robots.txt file to be configured properly. I am getting error emails from Google products stating they can't view our products because they are being blocked, and this past week, in my SEO dashboard, the URL's receiving search traffic dropped by almost 40%. Is there anyone that can offer assistance on a good template robots.txt file I can use for a Magento eCommerce website? The one I am currently using was found at this site here: e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/magento-seo/magento-robots-txt-seo.php - However, I am getting problems from Google now because of it. I searched and found this thread here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/multi-store_set_up/multiple_website_setup_with_different_document_roots#the_root_folder_robots.txt_file - But I felt like maybe I should get some additional help on properly configuring a robots for a Magento site. Thanks in advance for any help. Please, let me know if you need more info to provide assistance.
Technical SEO | | JerDoggMckoy0