Similar domain to trademark takedown request? Today I received the following, and there is no first notice. Is this a legitimate request? The &quot;mm-walmart.com&quot; domain and lack of any contact information is screaming a scam, attorney representation etc, but I am curious in general is there any basis to this kind of claim whether or not this is legitimate. The use of the domains are specifically to allow users of a training website to create test integrations and websites. Subject: 2ND NOTICE of Walmart Trademark Rights Infringement - walmartt.com ; Demand for Takedown Body: To Whom It May Concern: On behalf of Walmart Inc. (“Walmart”), we are writing to you in your capacity as the registrant of walmartt.com . Walmart is the owner of the famous trade name and trademark “WALMART” and has, for more than 50 years, used this term to identify its goods and services. Walmart also maintains rights in a number of additional trademarks. Moreover, Walmart has significant copyright holdings and other intellectual property rights in its logos and materials. There is no connection between Walmart and walmartt.com and your continued unauthorized use of Walmart's intellectual property as, within or as an identifiable element of a domain name does injury to both Walmart and to the public by, e.g., causing a likelihood of confusion and other damage. We have also determined that there is no fair use or other excuse for the unauthorized use. Therefore, applicable law requires that you cease use immediately of the unauthorized domain name specifically identified above. This communication is for potential settlement purposes and only for representative violations identified to date. Please reply to this email to discuss and confirm details of the discontinuation of use and potential transfer to Walmart of the subject domain name. If we do not receive your expeditious response, this matter may be escalated for further action. Sincerely, Walmart Brand Protection Walmart Inc. 508 SW 8th Street Bentonville, AR 72716-0505 brandprotection@mm-walmart.com
It's from a company called MarkMonitor that does trademark protection for clients - specifically around internet activities and that includes domain cybersquatting - which is illegal in the US under the ACPA, and of course that's what you were/are doing. So it could be a legitimate request as these things go. But that's not the whole story - the domain in the e-mail you posted is &quot;walmartt.com&quot; which is not only currently owned by Walmart Inc. but always has been, in fact the current Registrar of record is the aforementioned MarkMonitor. So either this isn't a legitimate request because you don't own &quot;walmartt.com&quot; and therefore this is spam or phishing (in which case feel free to delete it and move on with your life), granted that would be a pretty impressive bit of phishing since you are currently cybersquatting some Walmart-typo domains. Or you're just telling porkies all the way through your question for reasons of your own.
Is this legal? Generally yes, unless it unlawfully exceeds the scope of the license. Also, if it is, how can I check if it's permitted by the original store's EULA? Read the whole EULA, focusing on terms related to resale, assignment, and transferability.
Let me be sure that I understand the situation. You set up an account with Big Company, which uses BigCo as a trademark. You want email about that account to reach you with a unique address, so you set up 'BigCo@RichDomain.Com" and gave that as your email when setting up tha account. You don't plan to use that address for any purpose but communications from BigCo to you and from you to them. (Of course these aren't the actual names.) Have I understood the situation correctly? It seems that you ar not using 'BigCo" in trade, nor are you likely to be confused with an official representative of BigCo, so you are not infringing their trademark. However, someone using such an email more generally could perhaps be so confuse, so BigCo has a somewhat legitimate concern, as they cannot know the very limited use you plan to make of this address. The only way that the could force you not to use such an email address would be via a court order as part of a suit for trademark infringement, whcih under the circumstances I doubt they would get. However, unless they have some sort of contract with you to the contrary, they can control who registers on their site. and could refuse to register you using an email address that includes their name or alias. Convincing them to accept your registration, even though it does no harm to them, will almost surely be more trouble than it is worth. Give them "BigFirm@RichDomain.Com" or something else that is not their name, but will suggest their name enough that you will know who it is. This will serve your purpose fully, and avoid a long argument with people who are reading from a script (once you get past the automated process, if you can even do that). This is all assuming that I have understood the situation correctly. I am also largely assuming US law, since you didn't mention a jurisdiction. (EDIT: UK law should not be very different on these points.)
No, it's not illegal... Ads are shown as a contract between the site that hosts it and the advertising company. The contract does not stipulate that customers need to buy something, in fact, the contract can't force the customer to buy anything! At best, the contract can pay the hosting site based on the ad being shown, clicked, or any sale made after it. ...but you will do exactly the opposite Advertizement is made to put your own brand into the head of people. In fact, most ads don't have any effect on people. As I am writing this, ads for a kid TV, travels to Turkey and the primetime films for the weekend on the TV-station I have on are shown. I have no intention of consuming any of these advertised products. Impact of a campaign is measured by two metrics: people reached, and people responding. People reached is measured in clicks. People responding is measured in changes in earnings or sales. Clicking the ad increases the reached rating. If the rating is bad, the ad campaign is just ineffective... which leads to the most paradoxical thing: Bad advertisement and good advertisement both lead to more advertisement - bad to level out the missing response, good to maximize the response. By clicking on the ad you just funnel more money to the ad industry. When does it get illegal? [DDOS] The only way it would become illegal is if John Doe sets up a computer - or rather a botnet - and has that network click the ads thousands of times per second. Google can handle easily 83,000 searches per second, twitter gets more than 9000 tweets that are distributed to millions of people, Tumbler and Instagram handle together about 2500 posts per second. In fact, every second, more than 100000 Gigabytes of traffic run through the net. To have an impact on one site, you need to be truly a large number of calls... and then it is called a DDOS. DDOS is illegal under the CFAA, in this case 18 UC 1030: (a)Whoever— (5) (A)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; (b)Whoever conspires to commit or attempts to commit an offense under subsection (a) of this section shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section. In the UK, you'd break the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 section 3, because denying someone else service via DDOS is unauthorized, clearly unauthorized, and prevents access to any data (the website) on any computer (the server): (1)A person is guilty of an offence if— (a)he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer; (b)at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and (c)either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies. (2)This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act— (b)to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer But can a DDOS be protest? [NO!] Anonymous attempted to petition to make DDOS a legal form of protest in 2013. The petition got 6,048 of the 25000 signatures needed to warrant an answer by the white house - unlike people in 2016 asking for a Death Star. At least it prompted Joshua I. James to write a research paper about the proposal in March. He too points to the CFAA and Section 5A, especially the sentence I quoted above. Among a lot of stipulations, he points out that internet protest in the shape of a DDOS would need to follow the same rules as a legal protest on the streets - which for example demands that entrance to businesses can't be blocked, and one is not allowed to harass employees and customers. According to the general rules for legal protest as given, there are still a number of challenges. First and foremost, entrances to businesses should not be blocked. In terms of DDoS, if sustained denial of service takes place, then access (entrance) to the server (business)is eﬀectively blocked. This means that, at a minimum, sustained denial of service should be considered as a non-legal approach to protesting. Thus, he concludes sustained DDOS is per se can't be a legal protest, and even a non-sustained DDOS would impact people using the site in a way they will deem harassing - which means that even a non-permanent DDOS can't be a legal protest. And then comes the final blow: DDOS, unlike a real protest on the streets, can't, by its very nature, inform people of why there is protest, even if it were a form of protest! This means that nobody knows it is meant to be a protest and not a normal DDOS, and as it can't convey what the action is about, it can't be a proper protest.
You cannot copyright a word or name in and of itself, so you can't sue someone for having a novel titled 13 so long as their novel is distinct from your own. Trademarks can use certain words or word combinations, but often in a way that is stylized or symbolic of a particular unique style and may include font, coloring, and other unique artistic takes. For example, McDonalds cannot copyright or trademark the letter &quot;M&quot; but it can trademark the &quot;Golden Arches&quot; a unique stylized &quot;M&quot; that they use as signage to at all their locations. If the name is a brand of a certain product such, then the name can be trademarked but only with respect to that product. For example, if the Acme Wash-Master is a dish washing machine they can't sue Ace Wash Master, a unique dog bathing system, for using the name &quot;Wash Master&quot; since it's both styled different (Acme uses a dash between words. ACE uses a space) and non-competitive product lines (most people would not wash dishes in a dog bathing device... and one would certainly hope that no dog owners ever said to themselves &quot;Fido stinks and my tub is busted. The dish washer will do in a pinch!&quot;).
A reasonable person might well believe that your enterprise is being sponsored by or is affiliated with Amazon, and so you would be infringing Amazon's trademark. Even if there is no reasonable confusion, Amazon might well think otherwise and take legal action against you. You don't want to start a business by defending a lawsuit, even if you win, particularly not a suit from your supplier. Why not choose a different name, particularly as that would make it easier to expand into non-amazon cards later? Something like 'Buy Better gift cards' or 'Gift Card World' might be a better choice. In general, you may not use a firm or product name that would cause reasonable consumers to confuse you with the trademark holder, or to think that you are endorsed by, affiliated with, or sponsored by the trademark holder without permission (which you are not likely to get).
A basic rule of trademark law is that a trademark is protected only for use in the same industry, or in regard to the same general sort of thing. "Maxwell House" for example, is the name of a brand of Coffee, and no doubt a trademark. If A business used it as the name of a brand of mobile home, it would not infringe the mark of the coffee brand. "Java" as a term for coffee , has been slang for any and all coffee at least as far back as WWII. I doubt that it is a currently active trademark in any case. It is, however, the name of a currently active programming language. Calling a new computer technology "Java" would probably infringe that (although the makers of javascript, a quite different computer language, seem to have gotten away with it). But it is hard to see how a realty company would so infringe. Of course there might be details which would cause this name to be infringing in fact, that I have no way of knowing. You could play safe with Sumatra Realty instead. Evin a quickly dismissed suit for trademark infringement could cost a startup time and money that might be a fatal handicap.
I'm not a lawyer, but under the law as it's written, I see two problems: 17 USC 121 allows "authorized entities" to make and publish accessible copies of works. An "authorized entity" is defined as a nonprofit organization or a governmental agency that has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities. So if you, as a private citizen, decide to do this, it could conceivably be copyright infringement. You might have to set up some kind of non-profit organization to make it legal. It's also OK (I think) if you make such copies for your own personal use, so long as you don't redistribute them. So far as I can tell, nothing under 17 USC 121 requires the original publisher to provide an "authorized entity" with a copy in any particular format (PDF, paper, or otherwise) for making accessible copies. Basically, the law seems to have envisioned organizations of sighted people purchasing paper copies, transcribing them, and republishing them; not blind individuals doing electronic transcription for themselves. It might still be worth contacting Hal Leonard and asking what they can do for you, but unfortunately it doesn't look like the law requires them to do anything for you. As Nij points out in the comments, this really seems to be a question about the company's policy, rather than the law.