Trademarks (again)

[hannamyluv]

So today I received two letters from companies that we resell the products of. Enclosed with agreements that we would no longer advertise on the internet on their trademarked terms, misspellings, variations of and anything related. No pop-up, no text ads, no cpc, no internet, period.

It looks like a legal firm has sent out these in form letter form to a a good many people on these companies behalfs.

Can they do it? Is it legal. Okay, on the trademark term, sure, but on every variation possible? And advertise nowhere at all?

Sounds a little too greedy to me.

[rcjordan]

>but on every variation possible? And advertise nowhere at all?

Basically, the answer is yes. TM covers much broader ground than just the exact phrase, word, or logo. It can -and does- even cover "sounds like" or even "is the opposite of" the TM.

[hannamyluv]

But we are authorized resellers. We aren't selling the knock off. We are selling the trademarked product. We have permission to advertise that product because they sold it to us with the known intent of us reselling it. It would be like Sony going to WalMart and saying you can't advertise our products even though we sold them to you to resell.

I am not sure about the misspellings though. There is the lindows/windows case in court right now, I believe. And the Victor's/Victoria's Secret case got settled in favor of Victor's Secret when the judged ruled that no one would mix the two companies up. There are numerous domain name cases that have fallen on both sides of the wall.

And if they can own the trademark on all variations, that would technically mean that all webpages that had the trademarked or variation would be illeagle and the SE, not just CPC, would be in violation of that trademark and all variations by showing those SERPs. Wouldn't this be true?

[cline]

Sure it's legal. Sure it's greedy.

It's also stupid. You sell their products. If you are hindered from selling their products, then their products won't get sold.

[WebGuerrilla]

This usually happens with companies who also sell direct to consumers. I know of a couple people who are consultants that specialize in helping take back search engine positions and ppc listings from affiliates.

I know of one company who had an affilliate that had made somewhere around 800k in commissions. When the company realized that the mjority of the affiliates business was due to him running PPC campaigns for all of their TM's they canned the affilate and began buying the terms themselves.

The saved quite a bit of money.

[hannamyluv]

But, that's just it. We aren't affiliates. We are resellers. They don't pay us to sell their product, we pay them for the "privledge" of selling their product. They sell it to us at a certain price because then we handle fullfilment and customer support through our company, saving them that cost. They may have their own site but they are making no more off the sale after all the costs than if they sold it to us to sell.

It's just frustrating. We called this group and let them see the error of their ways. I think we weren't the only ones to complain because our rep there sounded a bit like a really big mistake had been made.

I could, on a certain level, see hitting your affiliates with this because you have all the costs associated with selling, shipping and supporting the product and the cost of the affiliate. But in this is another situation entirely. It's frustrating, is all.

[Learning Curve]

I'd guess there's an internal fight within the company between the Reseller Program and Website Sales... and the Reseller Program lost.