(Trademark)Sucks.com Ruled Illegal if Parked: My Personal Opinion
As announced on The Domains earlier today, if you own a (Trademark)Sucks.com domain name and decide to park it, you’re likely to lose it under cybersquatting and trademark infringement laws. This might be new news to you, but I’m not shocked by any means.
For years now, I have been waiting for the day that somebody would open their eyes and see that (Trademark)Sucks.com is infringing upon a companies trademark in so almost all cases. Most people who own such domain names simply park their name (now considered cybersquatting) or add content with a few ads in order to make some money. Both of these methods should have been illegal a long time ago. I am in complete and utter shock it took people this much time to see that parking (Trademark)Sucks.com domain names is illegal.
Why are people angry with this ruling? God only knows. If you don’t know what sparked this (Trademark)Sucks.com being ruled as cybersquatting, a court earlier today ruled the owner of Radioshacksucks.com was cybersquatting and infringing on Radio Shack’s trademark with his parked page. Now let me explain why I am in such support of this recent ruling that some are not happy with.
To start off, if you have a parked page that is (Trademark)Sucks.com, tell me how you’re making money. If you couldn’t answer that question, the answer is you’re making money through links for web pages about that trademark. Therefore, you’re making money off that trademark’s name, making (Trademark)Sucks.com domain names illegal.
If you have a (Trademark)Sucks.com domain name that has content and then optimized with ads, that should also clearly be considered illegal. Even though you are just expressing your negative opinion about a trademark or company, you are making money off that opinion. I can almost guarantee you that most of the time the ads on your site will be related to that trademark/company, or private advertisers will be paying to be on your website which revolves around a trademarked name. This means you’re making money off the trademark, and should therefore be considered illegal without a doubt.
Now, to me, this is common sense. If you know even the littlest bit about intellectual property laws, trademark infringement and/or cybersquatting, I couldn’t imagine you would think differently. I can see where a debate could come into play about a solely content based (Trademark)Sucks.com website without any ads, but don’t jump to the conclusion that just because there aren’t ads doesn’t mean it’s fair use. Most sites that are (Trademark)Sucks.com sites and content based without ads often have links to their other websites. If the user even has one link to their website on that (Trademark)Sucks.com site, that should really fall cybersquatting because their using that trademark’s name to gain traffic to a different site. Anyways, you get my gist.
I can go on all day blabbing about this. I’d like to hear your opinion though, so make sure to submit it below!
So, I would venture to guess that your take on it is that there should be NO free speech when it comes to criticizing companies.
Nice spin, but your apparent idea of using the Constitution for toilet paper does not appeal to me. So the blog has ads by google, or a reasonable facsimile. Big deal. I will not compromise our democratic ideals of freedom of expression just because some huge conglomerate wants to stifle free speech and thought.
I do hope that these companies pay you well for your threads as you do a praiseworthy job of protecting the Goliaths of big business against the Davids of the internet.
Cheers, and have a great day.
You are exactly, 100% correct.
However, you can expect that you’ll be burned at the domainers’ stake for daring to speak such “blasphemy.”
@ Marc – Thanks and trust me, I’ve been burned at the domainers’ stake plenty of times before
@WindyCity – While I’m not going to go into details about what I do for a living, I will say that no one has paid me, or influenced me to post this thread on my blog. Yes, surprisingly enough, I’m one of the few Chicagoans who is for big business. That’s exactly why in the title of my article I stated that this was my opinion. Everybody has their own opinions. I can have mine, you can have yours. This is what comments are for!
@Windy City
Free speech is fine. That’s why sites criticizing Dell Employees are allowed to function. But, they do not make money off of the site. The fact of the matter is, you can’t create a new gum, call it Stride Gum, and sell it. Sure, it could be your completely own product (like speech,) but you can’t make money off by using Stride’s name.
The same goes for these sites. You can create your own original site, but you can’t make money off of it, because you are still using their name.