LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Richard Russell <richard.russell@bigpond.com>
  To  : Damien Wilson <wilbs@seol.net.au>
        <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 14:20:33 +0930

RE: [OT] Legal advice required (web related)

> Hi all,

Hi Wilbs... :)

> Seeing as there seem to be quite a few good legal minds on this list (or
> people with connections to good legal minds), I am after a little bit of
> advice...

IDTTAOUAL (I don't think that any or us are lawyers), so you really ought to
check things like IPAustralia and so on...

> Recently (back in December last year), I registered a dot com for a friend
> that I was creating a Q&D website for and due to his ISP being
> reluctant to
> provide hosting for him until certain network upgrades were
> performed on the
> ISP's end, the website has only just gone online over Easter with a
> different ISP.
>
> I received an email this morning from the person who owns the Australian
> trademark "Aussiewood". This dot com that was registered is
> aussiewood.com.
> The owner of the trademark has asked us to cease using the name
> in Australia
> as they own that name.

I _doubt_ they have a case. They may have a case if it were .com.au, but...

> Now, my question is does this type of thing apply to dot coms? A
> quick look
> at the information supplied in the trademark database (search for
> no. 817994
> at
> http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/atmoss/falcon.application_start) and a
> look at the website (http://www.aussiewood.com) shows that they have
nothing
> in common bar the name. Can the owner of this trademark force me to hand
> over the domain to them? From what I have gathered, this would only apply
if
> the trademark was registered world-wide.

I suppose there is potential for them to get it, but I seriously doubt it.
I'm pretty sure that IPAustralia have a lot of documentation on where
trademarks apply... By the way, I would have assumed that this kind of thing
would really be up to your client... It's their domain, is it not? You're
just administering etc it... :)

> Can any of you shed some light on this rather murky subject?

rr

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