31–40 of 48 posts
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I thought I read somewhere that they were suing charities (?), which if true leaves me feeling it’s not so much of a bad thing that he’s doing.
It's a brand that built its success on nazi collaborationism, its extremely hard to feel sorry about any struggle it might have.
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I'm not sure the list of countries that use com.xx is particularly long. And the the list of those with that redirect is even shorter (one?!) Perhaps there's opportunity to bag the few others and drop them an offer. =)
If you do that, you’ll be facing a UDRP. You’ll be out a domain plus legal fees.
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This is quite a gross generalization. Do you often get judged for the sins of your predecessors? And if you buy anything from Ford, Mercedes, Porsche, Siemens, IBM, Kodak, Volkswagen, Bayer, Allianz, Coca Cola (yes, that Coca Cola), Chase, Standard Oil (Exxon, BP, Chevron) and many, many others what does that say about your principles?
One isn’t allowed to criticise one wrongdoing without also making sure to expressively criticise every other similar wrongdoing? Is that what we have come to?
There have been some insanely aggressive trademark cases in the US too. The University of Kentucky sued a small moonshine distiller for selling t-shirts that had the word ‘Kentucky’ printed on them.[0] That’s it, having the name of the state they resided in was enough to trigger Kentucky athletics. The shirts weren’t trying to knock off or reference Kentucky Athletics in any way, but that didn’t stop UK from putting…
On a tangent here, a bit over 20 years ago I used to work for a guy who registered "boss.com.xx" (where xx is a country TLD I won't detail) because that was the name of his publishing company here. This was still dialup/ISDN days for most small companies over here. He held on to it for a long time, but I noticed in the last couple of years that it now redirects to www.hugoboss.com. Knowing this particular person I am…
There have been some insanely aggressive trademark cases in the US too. The University of Kentucky sued a small moonshine distiller for selling t-shirts that had the word ‘Kentucky’ printed on them.[0] That’s it, having the name of the state they resided in was enough to trigger Kentucky athletics. The shirts weren’t trying to knock off or reference Kentucky Athletics in any way, but that didn’t stop UK from putting…
I really hope this got laughed out of court as hard as possible. It should only be a trademark issue when they're likely to be confused. That's not remotely likely here.
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His accusation is that Hugo Boss are going well beyond reasonable defense of their trademark, by suing businesses in entirely unrelated industries that use either 'Hugo' or 'Boss' in their names or their product names. One example he cited was Boss Brewing, a Welsh brewery who said they spent about £30,000 / 38,200 USD on legal costs and rebranding after being targeted by Hugo Boss. They're also alleged to have sent…
> His accusation is that Hugo Boss are going well beyond reasonable defense of their trademark The problem is that this question ultimately hinges on a court's judgment, and they can't know in advance what evidence of "reasonable defense of their trademark" will satisfy all the judges in all the cases where this issue is examined. So from the trademark-holder's point of view, the approach has to be to do everything t…
"Hey, we think your use of is a bit too close for comfort. We recognize it's not actually problem but it's in both our interest to avoid trademark dilution issues; let's discuss some minor changes and nail down an agreement".
Then both sides can point to the agreement if someone else tries to use that usage as a defense.
The real issue is not that they're communicating with people to ensure a clear delineation of uses, but that they're doing so in a very aggressive and hostile way and costing companies they do it to a lot of money.
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I really hope this got laughed out of court as hard as possible. It should only be a trademark issue when they're likely to be confused. That's not remotely likely here.
UK will likely lose, but what will it change though? The little guy has to spend time and money defending themselves and go through the stress that comes along with it. UK probably will write the costs off and sue someone else.
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I really hope this got laughed out of court as hard as possible. It should only be a trademark issue when they're likely to be confused. That's not remotely likely here.
UK will likely lose, but what will it change though? The little guy has to spend time and money defending themselves and go through the stress that comes along with it. UK probably will write the costs off and sue someone else.
In cases like this, I wish we had legislation that required trademark holders to defend all alleged violations unilaterally or something, because selectively going after certain cases creates a terrible power imbalance.
If the university feels so strongly about protecting their trademark with regard to apparel, they should have to file cases against everyone who violates it, nor just certain individuals or organizations.