Free Advertising or Trademark Infringement?

Although I see where Amazon is coming from with this, because they do own the trademark, it’s crappy that big companies have to bully little guys out of domain names because of it.

Myspace is doing the same thing, and it seems to be their way of protecting their brand… It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when large companies with huge revenue have to go after small fish and force them to take their sites down… but I guess in an online world where people abuse trademarks, the companies have to protect what is rightfully theirs.

Actually, the whole point of trademarks is to be able to control the use of your mark in the industry, so it not only makes sense for Amazon to go after domain registrations that infringe, but it’s actually *required* to do so by trademark law. I’ve received these sort of letters in the past from companies like Southwestern Bell and, more recently, Porsche.

Sounds to me that while Jason is doing a service that Amazon should appreciate, he’s doing it in a way that is inconsistent with patent law and it’s quite reasonable for Amazon to ask him to stop.

It’s not “bullying” as much as that might make for a good headline. It’s defending the company trademark and if you check out uspto.gov you’ll find that Amazon could *lose* its trademark if it doesn’t “actively defend” its use in the marketplace.

Finally, one more observation, based on my own experience with these situations: the legal team that goes after possible trademark infringements has no communication with and is probably physically quite distant from the marketing department, and doubly so at a company like Amazon.

I could side with both parties in this situation.

Due to a past situation that I had to deal with I would have to side with Amazon. It is extremely important to protect your brand. A few years ago I created a product that was sold online and shortly thereafter purchased a domain name that similar to mine. It turns out this person was also much better a SEO than myself, and his domain ranked much better than mine. His site absolutely destroyed my brand and led to many other copycat sites.

I think they sould look upon it as free advertising and be thankful.

Sorry folks. This is black-letter law cybersquatting. You CAN NOT register domains using third-party trademarks.

“He’s not trying to dilute their brand power or market power; he’s reporting about their product.”

You automatically dilute someone’s brand by registering their marks as a domain. And he is/was trying to profit by increasing his affiliate revenue / andd now is obtaining Google adword revenue.

“He’s not selling anything, so he obviously doesn’t meet the requirement that he’s acting in bad faith to profit from the mark.” Diverting traffic is also proof of bad faith. Clearly, he is trying to divert traffic.

What if every affiliate of Amazon could register domains using their trademarks on the basis of fair use?

You can resuse trademarked names on websites as long as you don’t use it to directly sell your competing product, and you refernce the owner of the mark. I do it a lot!

Unless he gets a cease and desist from Amazon, I wouldn’t touch a thing.

because of such news, we decided to enroll into Google’s Adsense than Amazon’s affiliate program for our website.

Sorry guys. Domain names are protected under law by the Anti-Cybersquatting law. Use of a domain name incorporating someone else’s trademark is not going to qualify as fair use.