In this case, New Yorker Mike Grimaldi owned a vintage Camaro that was in need of repairs. When searching on Google, he found an ad for Mr. Guinn’s reapair shop in Pennsylvania. Grimaldi called Guinn and spoke with him about his car. After deciding to choose Guinn to do the repairs for his Camaro, Grimaldi shipped his beautiful Camaro to Guinn and didn’t hear from Guinn for about 14 months. Now 14 months later, the only thing Guinn has done is took the car apart to a point where it needs more repairs than before and has lost value.

Grimaldi decided to file a case against Guinn for the loss of value of his car. The place where Grimaldi screwed up is he filed the case in Brooklyn, near his home. Guinn’s attorneys told Brooklyn courts that they didn’t have jurisdiction because Pennsylvania is Guinn’s place of business. Grimaldi’s attorneys responded that by advertising on Google AdWords in the state of New York, they are conducting business in the state of New York, therefore giving Brooklyn courts jurisdiction.

The county court where the case was originally filed denied Guinn’s motion, finding that advertising on Google AdWords in the state of New York and doing business with a person in the state of New York means that Guinn is doing business in the state of New York. When Guinn appealed, the Second Department upheld the lower court’s decision stating, “Despite the fact that Guinn was not physically present in New York, the exercise of jurisdiction over him by the courts of this State does not offend due process.”

Although there are other reasons for the finding of this case, do you think that by advertising on Google AdWords in another state and then conducting business with a person from that state means that you no longer have the personal jurisdiction you thought you had? My take on it is this; if you’re advertising in another state and providing any type of goods and services to a person in that state, then the courts are absolutely right to say you can be tried or sued in that state. If you are just advertising using Google AdWords in another state and not conducting business or providing goods and services to a person in that state, then you should be able to keep personal jurisdiction. What’s your opinion? Make sure to comment below.

While many people can barely afford a lawyer in the first place, for those of you who can afford a lawyer for transactions or lawsuits, you shouldn’t only consider lawyers known amongst the domaining industry. This isn’t meant to insult any of the firms who do often blog about domain transactions and trademark, but do you really want a lawyer who has that much time on there hands. Normally, a lawyer with a lot of free time and few clients isn’t the lawyer you want representing you. That probably means he or she is not the best lawyer in the world.

Of course, there are plenty of exceptions. Take Traverse Legal for example. You’ll see a blog post from them every once in a while on Domaining.com. They happen to get a lot of clients, and somehow squeeze in the time to post a blog post. There are plenty of other exceptions, but nonetheless, it’s something to think about.

I just think many intellectual property lawyers from big and small U.S. firms who don’t necessarily specialize in domains, but have tried cases including domain names, go overlooked a lot. And you shouldn’t only be looking into the names that Elliot listed on his blog post, but doing some research and calling some firms that you’ve heard of before and talking to general intellectual property lawyers. You’d be surprised, you might be able to afford them. Rates are going down, so now’s the time to get hooked up with a good attorney if you need one. Elliot wrote a well-researched post, but you need to be the one to take his research 1 step forward.

DomainGang.com is probably the funniest domaining blog I’ve ever read. They publish domain-related parody content meant for entertainment. Unfortunately, one of the biggest issues about delivering parody news is companies who are the center of a joke often take offense. This is similar to what happened in the South Butt versus North Face case.

The whole idea behind South Butt is to make fun of North Face. They even have a disclaimer on the homepage stating, “We are not in any fashion related to nor do we want to be confused with The North Face Apparel Corp. or its products sold under “The North Face” brand. If you are unable to discern the difference between a face and a butt, we encourage you to buy North Face products.”

According to an article published on Reuters, when North Face filed this case, they called Winklemann and South Butt “opportunists seeking to pirate its famous trademarks for their inferior knockoffs.”

While I’m not going to go into my feelings about this North Face/South Butt case, I just happened to find this whole situation amusing. I’m sure that both the South Butt and the DomainGang can tell you this, some people just don’t know how to take a joke.

The word “slate” is defined as a writing tablet. While it does seem to be a rather sketchy coincidence that the Chicago Tribune registered ChicagoSlate.com with all of the recent news about the iSlate, look at the company who registered the domain and consider what the domain could mean. The Chicago Tribune clearly wouldn’t ruin its reputation to cybersquat a domain that’s going to bring them negative attention. And like I stated previously, a slate is a writing tablet. It makes sense for the Chicago Tribune, a news company, to own a writing tablet.

One of the things that TheDomains brought up in their article was that the first ad on the page was titled, “Apps On Your iPhone”. I happened to be very impressed that TheDomains covered this story so quickly after the ChicagoSlate.com domain was registed. After checking a couple of times between yesterday and today, ChicagoSlate.com quickly changed their ads to revolve around the city of Chicago. Had ChicagoSlate.com kept the ad regarding the iPhone app on their site, then it would be a case of cybersquatting.

As a Chicagoan, I just wanted to clear that up for everyone. Feel free to comment, especially if you feel differently. I look forward to your comments. Enjoy your weekened!

In attempts to explain how exactly this domain name, Glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com, was a meme, Mr. Randazza used very unorthodox examples to describe a meme, such as:

“Similarly, nobody really thinks that “Every time you masturbate… God kills a kitten,” which was an internet meme that originated on the same website that spawned the Glenn Beck meme, Fark.com. See Wikipedia “Every time you masturbate … God kills a kitten” (Annex D). Memes are not supposed to be statements of fact, and audiences understand this.”

Quite frankly, I’ve read quite responses to claims before out of interest, and I’ve never seen examples as wild as that one before. But sometimes, you need to make your arguments stand out to the reader, which is exactly what Mr. Randazza did in that previous example. Another explanation that I found humorous of memes from the response to the claim was:

“From “Mr. Spock Ate My Balls,” (defunct) to ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US3 to “Leeroy Jenkins”4 to a slew of sub-memes based on the movie “300”5, internet memes are as old as the internet itself, and almost as ubiquitous as actual cybersquatters.”

While Mr. Randaza, as discussed above, submitted an unorthodox response to Mr. Beck’s claim, Beck ended up losing the dispute. In the end, Mr. Eiland-Hall ended up giving back the domain name to Mr. Beck anyways (don’t ask my why he would spend all that money on a lawyer and give Mr. Beck the domain name). You can find the fully downloadable documents (the complaint, response, etc.) on Mr. Randazza’s blog.

I would love to get your thoughts on this, so comments would be appreciated! Submit them below!

Snapnames does have a compnay policy about employees not bidding on auctions. In this case, Brady was the employee that was bidding on names with the intent of raising the auction selling price.

Because Snapnames is giving back money to all of the people who were involved in auctions in which Brady was bidding in, there are no damages to those users.

So what are the damages exactly? How can Brady be criminally prosecuted, unless Snapnames encountered any damages? How can they prove that Brady was bidding for the purpose of rasing the auction price, rather than bidding out of interest for a lot of names that he lost? These questions are all going unanswered, and until we know the answer to them, we cannot assume or even Brady will be criminally prosecuted rather than just fired. Submit your comments below!

To be honest, I think all of these celebrities are pulling a publicity stunt. That’s what everything’s about with these celebrities these days. Numerous times, I have talked about when I got my cease and desist letter a long time ago from one of the top PGA golfers. I gave him the name, and guess what he did with it…NOTHING. Many of these celebrities who go after their names don’t do a thing with them.

As I said, it’s all a publicity stunt. They’re pulled out of the spotlight, but then they spend a few thousand dollars on an intellectual property lawyer, and they’re back in the spotlight. I’d like to get your comments on this, so make sure to submit them below!

While the economy is still hurting many of your average American’s, are we really resorting to contributing to the delinquency of a minor, filing a false police report report, and attempting to influence a public servant just to help market ourselves?

Now I’m no idiot. I know I am giving you a very extreme example. But more and more often, I’m seeing people resorting to illegal activity in order to market and gain traffic to their websites. For example, the most common example these days is when people buy typo domains of similar companies in their industry and foward it to their website, that’s illegal. It’s called trademark infringement. Know it, learn it and obide by it.

Illegal activity is no way to market your name, trademark or website. While this may seem dumb that I am actually writing an article on not committing illegal activity for marketing (or anything else of course), more and more people are doing it. It’s amazing to me. Do these people have no legitimate legal knowledge? Do these people not read or listen to the news? Anyways, I’d love to hear your comments, and happy friday!

Source: The Chicago Tribune (my hometown)

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My belief is that this was planned. When someone infringes upon your trademark, you can sue them for your damages. Price is claiming the loss of her domain name put her out of business. That could allow her to collect a huge amount in damages. Sometimes courts award the plaintiff double or triple the amount of damages. It varies from case to case. But Price probably figured if her company gets run into the ground, she can blame it on a domain name she trademarked, and sue for a large sum of money.

Believe it or not, this is actually an entire industry. People buy trademarks from others and find people who are infringing upon them. They then go and sue those people, and make a good amount of profit.

Price got smart and decided to do this with her own trademark. It’s amazing what some people will do for money these days. But as I said, Price is using an interesting technique.

Keep in mind this is an opinionated article. I’d love to hear your comments, so make sure to submit them below!

Who in their right mind would fight a company as big as Yahoo on a domain name that clearly broke UDRP rules, laws and regulations? I don’t know much about the laws of the Kingdom of Spain, but my guess is the owner got smart and thought that because there was no UDRP laws in Spain, he could get away with it. But how can somebody be so ignorant when they know what they’re doing is wrong and still go out and spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer who gives them false hope to fight there helpless case. This is one of the most obvious cases of trademark infringment I have seen in my lifetime. I’d like to hear some comments from you guys though, so make sure to submit them below!