

Gun auction site gets nastygram from trademark enforcement firm, fights back - jim-greer
http://www.vegastrademarkattorney.com/2009/05/gunbrokercom-seeks-declaratory-relief.html

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jim-greer
These guys threatened us as well - I thought it was interesting that hiring a
trademark troll that gets a cut of damages may violate legal ethics rules.

Anyone else been threatened by these guys?

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chris11
That is interesting. Were they just trying to get a game removed, or were they
actually going after Kongregate?

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jim-greer
Their opening salvo was to claim that we were willfully infringing H&K
trademarks, and that we should send them $5,000 and remove all games with the
trademarks. We said that we couldn't go through all 15,000 games on the site
and search for their marks, but if they would give us specific games, we would
follow the DMCA process. They sent us one url, we contacted the developer, he
changed it to be a generic gun within a couple of hours.

They said we should now go through all the other games and remove the
references. We replied:

"We will continue to handle infringing games as you bring them up to us.
However, it is clear to us that it is not our legal responsibility to police
trademark in our games. Federal courts have made this explicit in decisions
such as Hendrickson vs. Ebay:

Plaintiff argues that he is entitled to an injunction that restrains eBay from
any further displaying [in the future] … of any false and/or misleading
advertisements in connection with the sale/distribution of 'counterfeit'
Manson DVD's via its web site. … No authority supports Plaintiff's position.
Indeed, such an injunction would effectively require eBay to monitor the
millions of new advertisements posted on its website each day and determine,
on its own, which of those advertisement infringe Plaintiff's Lanham Act
rights. … "no law currently imposes an affirmative duty on companies such as
eBay to engage in such monitoring." Further, the court's recent 'innocent
infringer' ruling was premised on the Court's determination that eBay has no
affirmative duty to monitor its own website for potential trade dress
violation and Plaintiff had failed to put eBay on notice that particular
advertisements violated his Lanham Act rights before filing suit.

We will continue to work with you as you put us on notice, but we cannot
monitor all the games users upload to our site for infringement and are not
legally required to do so."

They sent something snarky back but left us alone after that.

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vaksel
can't you just add something like "trademarks and brands listed on this
website are the property of their respective owners." to avoid getting
trademark trolled?

