Could Misspelled Search Terms Cost You Business?
by Jason Edge, October 27th, 2011
In a world where a high percentage of goods and services are researched and bought on the web it is essential that you make yourself visible to potential buyers.
For most businesses this means using an SEO specialist to help your site rank well in search engines like Google and striving for that ever elusive top spot on page one of results for your keywords. However there have been some examples of brands being hijacked in order to gain traffic and business.
In the High Court recently, Interflora claimed that M&S was infringing its registered trademarks by purchasing several keywords containing the mark INTERFLORA. Consumers searching on the Internet using these keywords would be shown a sponsored link to M&S’s online flower-delivery service. You don’t have to have an in-depth knowledge of trademark infringement to know that this is a little ’Black Hat’ in approach.
Slightly less obvious are those competitors that prey on misspellings of your company name or product. By registering domains that are misspellings of a competitor or optimising your site to pick up these search term errors can also mean that you could end up in court.
Although we have a great team of brand protection lawyers it is always better to adopt a ‘prevention is better than cure’ approach. I recommend that you use a spelling typo generator to help you determine the different ways your brands could be misspelled either through missed or inserted keys, double letters, skipped spaces or skipped letters.
If you feel that any of these misspellings could be used by others then it may be worth you registering the domain yourself or asking your SEO agency to look at ways of including these on your site.
Having done this exercise myself I was surprised to see how just how many ways Mayo Wynne Baxter could be misspelled:
It makes sense for us to protect our own brand but our name is so distinctive that it would be hard for someone else to defend using any of the above to promote their law firm. Check out yours and if you find that a competitor is already using one of your misspellings then I have some great lawyers who would be happy to look into dealing with this for you.
Bell Boy
by Martin Williams, June 9th, 2011
Many inventions are completely useless, although for some reason consumers are still happy to buy gadgets and gizmos as presents for birthdays, Christmases and so on.
However a smart Croydon based 13 year old boy, Laurence Rook, has actually invented something of potential use, particularly for regular online shoppers – an activity that will no doubt continue to increase. Laurence’s mother missed several deliveries (albeit deliveries for a Playstation for Laurence) as she was not home, which gave Laurence the idea of creating a doorbell which telephones the occupant of the property if the door is not answered within 8 seconds.
He worked hard cleaning cars in order to pay for a prototype to be made in China. So far, it is not completely clear whether Laurence has taken steps to protect his intellectual property rights to his invention but hopefully he did take appropriate action before revealing his idea to the public. Failure to do so could result in him significantly losing out financially.
He already has orders worth up to £250,000, which is pretty impressive for a teen. It is thought that each unit will retail at £40.00.
By Rebecca Pitt
Who owns App Store?
by Martin Williams, January 13th, 2011
As a recent Apple convert (I LOVE my Mac), I have to say I would be inclined to take sides on this one. The issue is that Apple have made an application to trademark the works “App Store” – basically, this means that Apple would have the exclusive legal right to use those words if the application is successful. This would mean that all the other tech companies with their own apps would be precluded from using the term.
Dealing firstly with the legal aspect, a trademark is a sign or name used to distinguish products or services. In order to successfully register a trademark, you need to ensure that the words you wish to trademark are not generic. For instance, it would be highly unlikely that you could obtain a trademark for the word “computer”, or “toaster”. Those words would be too descriptive of what the product actually is.
What you need to ensure, therefore, is that your trademark is distinctive from existing trademarks and not generic.
The issue that has now arisen with Apple is that Microsoft claim that the words “App Store” are generic. This might make you wonder why Apple have been able to trademark that word and why Microsoft have been able to trademark the word “Windows” – the reason is that those words do not relate specifically to the technology services they provide.
Apparently Apple have already bought all the domain names relevant to App Store in any event, so the impact of the decision might not be a disaster. It could be said that Apple in fact create the most popular products on the technology market today, and generally have been far more creative than Microsoft in that respect, so why shouldn’t they get the trademark? One comment I have read is that Apple should simply call it “AppleApps” – funnily enough this might have much better prospects of success with the relevant authority in the United States - and personally I think it has a better ring to it.
As part of a team of trademark lawyers in Brighton, I will be interested to see what happens. And if you would like to find out more about registering trademarks, or trademark disputes, just get in touch by email – rpitt@mayowynnebaxter.co.uk.
By Rebecca Pitt
Making Copyright Right
by Martin Williams, November 24th, 2010
We are in the 21st century with technologies constantly being created, developed and improved. The question today which needs serious thought is whether current copyright law actually works to protect owners from infringement.
It is, of course, important to ensure that copyright owners’ interests are properly protected. However today it is very easy to copy almost anything, and most people do this on a daily basis in one way or another, sometimes even unintentionally. Photographs can be copied from websites and used elsewhere, music and films are copied all over the UK.
A new concept called a “private right to copy” has been introduced by the Institute for Public Policy Research which suggests that the copying of CDs and DVDs for private use should be decriminalised. This would mean that when individuals copy CDs onto their computers to transfer it across to their iPods, for example, it would be a perfectly legitimate action to take. The law as it currently stands prevents this – but what is the point? This type of activity is not capable of being monitored and it is not logical to have it in place. Individuals quite simply do not care whether or not they are entitled to copy a CD onto their computer as no one will ever know.
If the private right to copy concept takes off, it will mean a reduction in Digital Rights Management technologies (DRM) and hopefully changes in copyright laws will start to deal adequately with digital content.