European City Guide Lose Trademark Claim
See Also Trade Mark Applications, Withdrawal of Attorney
We Survived! The ECG's efforts to take this website away from us for copyright infringement has failed! They lost on all 3 major points however our response that they had brought the case in bad faith was not carried.
History
On July 22nd 2003: the US Law Firm Gallop, Johnson, & Neuman, L.C. (GJN) applied for the US trademark "ECG European City Guide". GJN work for other associated companies including Ovag and Nova Channel AG They wasted no time in then claiming that our use of the letters ECG was an infringement of their trademark. On July 23rd: Yahoo! Closed both the ECG Discussion Lists containing ECG receiving a threat from the GJN (Later Denied). On July 24th we received the first communication from Christopher W. Byron of GJN demanding effective removal of stopecg.org.
On August 6th we replied, stating that we would not comply and on August 8th Lycos received a similar cease and Desist letter to Yahoo, they also complied, closing the account stopecg@lycos.com. 5 days later GJN filed a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy with the National Arbitration Forum in the USA. The complaint if upheld would have resulted in our having to hand our domain to the ECG. The thrust of their argument was that we were running a website that was confusingly similar to their trademark and as such might divert Internet users from them.
Case
Their argument was quite honestly farcical, claiming as they did to trade in Maps, guides and tourbooks they stated that we were effectively stealing their visitors in a deliberate act of bad faith. When challenged they failed to show any place where the much maligned European City Guide was offered for sale, they did however eventually provide proof that they had used the moniker ECG prior to the registration of stopecg.org. Guess what, it was used just once, in the very small print of their Early contracts, on a version that has been ruled to be misleading. The letters ECG were in very small print that has lead to their forms being ruled to be deceitful!
We countered, arguing that their case was being brought in bad faith and was a deliberate attempt to muzzle our criticism of the European City Guide. This sort of activity is known as Reverse Domain Name Hijacking.
They lost comprehensively on their complaint but we did not get a ruling of attempted Reverse Domain Name Hijacking. To win the latter would have been a minor gain, we could have claimed costs, but as we represented ourselves these were nominal. It was still a disappointment not to show them up in this matter.
The full decision can be read here
A big part of their argument was that "stop" was a generic word and as such it's use in combination with ECG did not separate our site from their trademark. They cited the use of "Sucks" as a form of disparagement that did sufficiently separate critical websites. Needless to say, we took the precaution of reserving ecgsucks.org just in case we lost!
As soon as ecgsucks.org is up and running we will let you know!
Back to front page | Withdrawal of Attorney | News Archive | @nti Copyright please distribute!