Posts tagged Trademark
AdGooroo Trademark Insight Tool Makes Infringement Monitoring A Breeze
Jan 20th
Some of you may not have any issues with other advertisers infringing on your trademarked terms via search marketing… count yourselves lucky. For those of us who have been left by the search engines to self-police these problems, AdGooroo’s Trademark Insight tool can turn a laborious challenge into…
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No More ‘BBX’: Trademark Dispute Reveals Strange RIM Stance
Dec 7th
A temporary restraining order issued by a federal court in Albuquerque on behalf of a software company that produces a version of BASIC, has compelled Research In Motion to start calling the next version of its operating system for BlackBerry smartphones “BlackBerry 10.” This according to a tweet from the company’s official Twitter feed.
The name BBx (albeit with a small “x”) is being used by Basis Software of Albuquerque as a trademark for its Business BASIC language interpreter, which is a classic language interpreter capable of extending business logic established over the previous decades to a platform that reaches smartphones, including BlackBerrys. Perhaps the most startling element of this case came from RIM, whose U.S.-based subsidiary had claimed in court, according to the judge’s ruling, that the Singapore developers’ conference to which the restraining order applies is not all that important to anyone in America.
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“RIM argues that its alleged conduct would have an insufficient effect on United States commerce to grant an injunction,” reads Judge William P. Johnson’s ruling yesterday, “pointing out that the upcoming Singapore conference is intended to serve customers in Asia and that only several of the 700 people who will be attending the conference will be from the United States. RIM also contends that the conference will not be broadcast live, and any references on the Internet to the conference will not have the required significant effect on commerce.”
By contrast, Judge Johnson went on, Basis Software argued that it would be naïve for RIM or anyone else to assume that the impact of an Asia developers’ conference would be limited to Asia. “The Court agrees with this assessment,” he wrote, “finding it somewhat ironic that the very nature of the disputed software product is making world-wide dissemination of information more easily accessible than before.”
“BlackBerry 10″ was a name that had been bandied about in the press and elsewhere as a likely name for its completely new operating system, which was previewed last October in San Francisco. The new system represents a developmental dead-end for BB OS 9, whose architecture could not adequately be extended to the emerging tablet market that RIM must also cover, preferably not with a separate OS as with today’s PlayBook.
One of the developmental hurdles the next BlackBerry system continues to face – one for which developers worldwide will indeed be looking to Singapore for clues to a solution – concerns a key element of its authentication mechanism. Historically, BlackBerry users have been associated with single phones, with the understanding that it wouldn’t make sense for someone to own two or three mobile phones. The emergence of the tablet changes all that. Today, for a PlayBook tablet to access a BlackBerry user’s account, it must be tethered to a physical BlackBerry phone – an connection which the manufacturer (unsuccessfully) tried to market as fun and exciting.
Another hurdle concerns the new system’s identity, the name change for which may (just as ironically) reveal the limited impact it may have on the consumer mindset.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Settles Lawsuit, Gets “Tweet” Trademark
Oct 11th
Twitter and Twittad have settled their dispute over the word “tweet,” though Twittad will retain the right to use the tagline, “Let your ad meet tweets.”
Twitter has been trying to trademark “tweet” since Apri…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Exposing Black Hat PPC Techniques: Stealing Competitor’s Trademark Traffic in Google Adwords
Jul 14th
Want to learn how to steal your competitor’s high-quality brand traffic and redirect it to your site using Google Adwords? “Against their terms,” you say? Rubbish! I’ll show you how a black hatter did just that to a client of mine costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost traffic!
Recently, a client ran into an issue with their Google Adwords campaigns. Their brand-targeted campaigns began to produce fewer and fewer conversions, while their CPA (cost-per-action) started climbing rapidly. It wasn’t long before they were paying twice as much per conversion and getting half as many per day. A quick bit of investigation revealed that we were only getting a small share of the available queries for our well-known brand and domain name.
An inspection of Google’s results revealed nothing. There was my client’s ad, where it should be with no other ads present. Obviously whoever was siphoning off traffic was being very deceptive about it. My initial thought was that they were day-parting their traffic and only showing their ad during early morning hours, but after a few sleepless nights i confirmed this wasn’t the problem.
My next step was to use a proxy that was located in a different state to check the Google results. An ad which appeared to belong to my client showed up, with the same title & description and showing my client’s website. Clicking the ad caused a competitor’s site to come up instead of my client’s site, a clear violation of Google’s terms since the URL of the final destination, after the redirect, did not match the ad’s display URL.
I went back to Google to see if the ad showed up for my client’s domain as well as their brand name. It did. I clicked it again, but this time I got redirected to my client’s site instead of the competitor. I went back to the original trademark term i had searched and clicked the ad again. Again I was redirected to my client’s site.
“Well that’s weird,” I thought.
I copied and pasted the destination url and found something that looked like this:
http://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=CAsqXJqLITbLjK8iagQfkqe2DCuD_lZ4CiG7G1yyV3J4xCAAQAVCGvph1YMnWrIfco 8QQyAEBqQJWZt7pooqYPqoEHk_QE2yD9UlXdHsS-zdkm2-4VemNnXiQxxZQ38nPw&sig=AGiWqtwAJ2evlzQJvjiJDaoysxKsaXy3Xw&ved=0CAgQ0Qw&adurl=http://someredirectdomainwithalotofcha racterssothatitlookslikeparametersintheurlinsteadofaredirectdomain.eu/track/61/
Google prefaces your ad’s destination URL with a bunch of encrypted encrypted information so they can measure clickthroughs and other information. In order to see the actual URL, you have to isolate whatever is after “adurl=”
http://someredirectdomainwithalotofcharacterssothatitlookslikeparametersinthe urlinsteadofaredirectdomain.eu/track/61/
This was the actual destination URL of the ad. I did a fruitless WHOIS search of the domain which turned up nothing because the domain had privacy protection enabled.
So then I thought, they are using my client’s registered trademark so I’ll file a trademark infringement complaint with Google. Surely, this will do the trick! Since they had copied my client’s ad copy verbatim, it should be a fairly easy process to get ad removed. However I made the mistake of not reading the form thoroughly and check both the box that says I’m complaining about the keywords they are bidding on and about their ad copy. After three weeks of waiting for a response, my complaint was denied. Turns out that in the US, you cannot complain about others bidding on your trademark terms. If you check that box, they just deny it even if your complaint about the ad copy is legitimate.
So my next step was to notify the policy team, through my Adwords rep, that this advertiser was violating Google’s terms by redirecting to a competitor instead of the display URL. To my dismay I received a response that the final landing page they kept seeing was my client’s site instead of the competitor’s site. I was at a dead end.
I decided to dig deeper and see exactly what this shady advertiser was doing. What I discovered was a black hatter’s dream. This guy had built a PHP redirect script which redirected users to his link on the first click, and to my client’s site every other click after that. It worked by storing the IP address of the incoming request and would reset every 24 hours. This made it very difficult to detect. Even though you may see the competitor’s site on the first click, every other click after that took you to my client’s site making it appear as everything was fine.
What was brilliant about this, is that the first click is by far the most valuable one. Most people will only click an ad once and either buy something or not. The second time they click they are half as likely to convert as the first time. If they click three or more times within the same day, the system is likely to flag their activity as click fraud so theoretically you would be refunded for it anyway.
In addition, you can make the script’s activity harder to detect if you grab a list of googlebot IP’s so that Adwords is never able to automatically disable your ads due to the destination not matching the display URL of the ad. Another nifty trick this black hatter was doing was to use IP-based geolocation to always show my client their site rather than the competitor’s, making it even harder to detect.
In the end, I ended up having to recreate the issue and record it on video in order to prove to Google’s compliance department that there was a problem. Even with that, it took them three months to finally get around to shutting this black hatter’s ads off. Overall, the competitor’s ads ran for 6 months and cost my client hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So why would someone like myself write a story about this? Aren’t I opening the door to a militia of black hatters that could copy this technique and replicate it? Yes, but not because I condone this behavior. The bottom line is that this is happening right now by a handful of black hatters that were sneaky enough to figure this out. By bringing this to light, I am hoping that Google invests some time into figuring out how to permanently put an end to this glaring issue. If this were done to an overly bureaucratic non-technical fortune 500 company, it may take years for anyone to detect it and cost that company millions in lost sales.
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Exposing Black Hat PPC Techniques: Stealing Competitor’s Trademark Traffic in Google Adwords
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Apple Sued for Trademark Infringement by VOIP Company iCloud Communications
Jun 10th
Apple has had its share of trademark disputes in recent years, such as Cisco’s trademark of the iPhone trademark and Fujitsu’s ownership of “iPad.” Now iCloud Communications is suing Apple over the iCloud trademark, according to The Next Web.
iCloud Communications is based in Arizona and filed the suit in the U.S. District Court there. The company was founded in 2005 offers a variety of VOIP, SIP, PBX and conferencing services.
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The suit, made available on Scribd by The Next Web’s Brad McCarty, includes a history of Apple’s trademark suits going back to the company’s beginnings, when it was sued by the Beatles’ record company Apple Corp. From the suit:
As was the case of the “iPhone” and “iAd” marks, Apple discreetly applied for a foreign trademark registration for ICLOUD months prior to the launch announcement on June 6, 2011 (Apple applied initially in Australia for iPhone, Canada for iAd and Jamaica for iCloud). That foreign ICLOUD application appears to now form the basis for the various iCloud applications for which Apple filed in the United States on June 1, 2011. Apparently, Apple is attempting to use a foreign jurisdiction’s laws to gain priority for its U.S. registrations while circumventing the notice and publication requirements for trademark applications filed here in the United States with respect to “intent-to-use” applications
iCloud Communications described this as “just one more example of Apple’s “act first and worry about the consequences later” approach to trademark use.”
The suit follows allegations that Apple swiped the concept and branding of a rejected App Store app.
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European Advocate General Finds Against Trademark Bidding in Interflora Case
Mar 24th
The European Advocate General is recommending that the Court of Justice of the European Union rule against retailer Marks & Spencer for bidding on the trademarked terms of Interflora, the flower delivery network company. If the Court of Justice acts on the findings, it could effectively spell…
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Twitter Suspends UberTwitter, Twidroyd Over Trademark & Privacy Violations [Updated]
Feb 19th
Twitter has just announced in its user help center that it has “suspended UberTwitter and twidroyd for violating our policies.” Twitter acknowledged that it normally suspends “hundreds of applications” that violate policies, but this time around it is sharing this information “because today’s suspension may affect a larger number of users.”
We spoke with Twitter communications director Carolyn Penner and she told us that this was the result of discussion that have been on-going since April 2010. Read on for details.
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Update: Twitter communications just tweeted, saying that nothing has been resolved. “We’ve been talking to UberMedia abt policy violations since they were founded. We haven’t reached a resolution (re: http://t.co/vG4Re9d),” the company tweeted. We’ve inquired with Twitter in regards to Gross’ statement, but that surely doesn’t sound resolved to us.
Update: UberMedia CEO Bill Gross has issued a statement on today’s events, included below:
Early Friday morning, Twitter shut off access to its service by several of our Twitter client applications: UberTwitter, Twidroyd, and UberCurrent. Twitter then notified us that they believed we were in violation of several provisions of their terms of service.
We were immediately in touch with Twitter, and the changes they asked us to make were very small. As a result, we have completed the changes, and new apps are currently being posted to their respective stores. Twitter has assured us that as soon as those changes were complete, they would reactivate our applications.
Twitter also asked us to modify the name of UberTwitter. We began a process of changing the name three weeks ago by polling our users, and we’ve decided based on their input to change the product name to UberSocial, which we completed today.
To our millions of loyal users, we appreciate your patience during this temporary period. We look forward to continuing our innovations on the Twitter platform.
As a side note, the name “UberSocial” was the previous name of another of UberMedia’s apps, which was released under the name “UberCurrent” earlier this week and is therefor not all that “UberWeird”.
The announcement goes on to suggest users that normally use Twitter with Twidroyd or UberTwitter try Twitter for Blackberry, Twitter for Android or other official Twitter apps.
We have suspended UberTwitter and twidroyd for violating our policies.
Every day, we suspend hundreds of applications that are in violation of our policies. Generally, these apps are used by a small number of users. We are taking the unusual step of sharing this with you because today’s suspension may affect a larger number of users.
We are committed to helping you continue to use Twitter during the disruption of these applications. You can download Twitter for Blackberry, Twitter for Android and other official Twitter apps here. You can also try our mobile web site or apps from other third-party developers.
We’ve reached out to UberTwitter and Twidroyd for comment but haven’t yet received a response. We will update this story as soon as we do.
According to Twitter, the reason these apps were suspended were for a variety of policy violations, from trademark issues to privacy issues with Direct Messages. Here is the statement we received from Twitter:
We ask all developers in the Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole.
We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone.Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways. These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.
We’ve had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation. We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.
Reactions from around Twitter are varied, support for Twitter to questioning of its motives in suspending third-party apps while promoting its own.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Court Reversal Brings Surprising Loss For Google In Trademark Case
Feb 18th
A Federal judge in California has denied Google’s motion to dismiss a “false association” claim in Daniel Jurin’s case against it, surprisingly reversing his own previous rulings. Intellectual property attorney Eric Goldman reported the development in his Technology and…
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