Day: April 15, 2003

Court Rules Path Names Don’t Violate Trademarks

If I had managed to register PETA.Com, I would be clearly be violating PETA’s trademark. But what if I have a path on my web site such as http://www.animalrights.net/peta/? Is that a trademark violation?

Believe it or not somebody actually tried to sue on just that issue. Interactive Products Corp., which manufacturers the Lap Traveler laptop stand sue A2ZSolutions.Com over a URL that that included /laptraveler/. A2ZSolutions had been selling the Lap Traveler, but when IPC told it to stop, it sold a competing product using the same URL. In many Internet searches for “Lap Traveler”, the A2ZSolutions.Com site had a very high listing. So Interactive Products Corp. sued?

A court rejected the lawsuit saying,

[T]o succeed on nay of its trademark claims at issue in this appeal, IPC must show that the presence of its trademark in the post-domain path of a2z’s portable-computer-stan web page is likely to cause confusion among consumers regarding the orign of the goods offered by the parties.

[I]n this case, there is a preliminary question about whether defendandts are using the challenged mark in a way that identifies the source of their goods. If defendants are only using IPC’s trademark in a ‘non-trademark’ way — that is, in a way that does not identify the source of a product — then trademark and false designation of origin laws do not apply.

Stated another way, the issues is whether a consumer is likely to notice ‘laptraveler’ in teh post-domain path and then thinkt hat the Mobile Desk may be produced by the same compay (or a company affiliated with the company) that makes the Lap Traveler.

. . .

Because post-domain paths do not typically signify source, it is unlikely that the presence of another’s trademark in a post-domain path of a URL woudl ever violate trademark law.

In any case, the court went on to note, IPC didn’t bother to actually produce an evidence that such a confusion was likely, and its appeal was rejected.

Source:

Sixth Circuit finds no trademark violation in post-domain paths. Steven Wu, LawMeme, April 12, 2003.

Threatening Defendants with Enemy Combatant Status

Glenn Reynolds first mentioned this on his weblog a couple weeks ago, but a CNN story about the guilty plea entered by one of six Americans from Buffalo, New York accused of attending an Al Qaeda training camp offers more details about a disturbing tactic apparently being used by prosecutors — threatening to classify defendants as enemy combatants unless they take the plea bargain.

On April 8 Sahim Alwan, 30, plead guilty to attending the training camp, becoming the fourth of the six men to plead guilty. Alwan plead guilty to one count of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization (as CNN points out, the terrorist organization was essentially just the 6 men indicted).

The disturbing part is in the very last paragraph of the CNN story about the plea bargains,

The government has explicitly renounced in the plea agreement any right to detain Alwan as an enemy combatant, an assurance also given to Galab, Mosed and Goba, although Battle conceded that his office had discussed that possibility with the Defense Department.

Why include that sort of renunciation as part of the plea bargain unless the government had not only been considering classifying them as enemy combatants, but also made it clear to the defendants that if they didn’t reach a plea they might be classified as such?

If that’s what happened here, that really goes to confirm all of the darkest suspicions about the way the Bush administration is using (and apparently abusing) the enemy combatant designation.

Source:

Fourth guilty plea in Buffalo terror case. Phil Hirschkorn, CNN, April 8, 2003.

Nigerian Journalist Gives Obasanjo, Others an Earful

The journalist whose article sparked the Miss World riots in Nigeria that ended up killing 220 people gave an interview to the BBC in March in which she lashed out at Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and others who often seemed to be angrier at her than the rioters — and all over a completely innocuous remark (at least innocuous in any country not beholden to religious extremists).

Isioma Daniel’s article in the newspaper ThisDay sparked riots because she said that Mohammed would not have objected to the Miss World pageant and would have probably taken one of the contestants for a wife.

Frankly living in a country where a man who immerses holy symbols in urine can get a federal grant, it’s a bit bizarre to imagine living in a country where people kill each other over whether or not Mohammed would have enjoyed seeing a little skin at a beauty pageant.

Obasanjo — who vacillates between saying he will crack down on Muslim extremists and appeasing them — said that the article should not have been published and suggested that Daniel could be prosecuted for what she said. Brother. Or as Daniel told the BBC,

I think he should have been criticizing the people who were out in the streets who were killing and rampaging in the name of religion. I think he should have been speaking out harder against the Northern Islamic religious leaders who had encouraged their followers to go out in the streets.

Yes, but this is the same Obasanjo who has managed to find a way to make gasoline scarce and expensive in Nigeria despite that country being one of the world’s leading oil exporters, so the man has a lot of experience with missing the obvious.

The Nigerian state of Zamfara did follow Obasanjo’s lead by issuing a fatwa calling for her death (the northern states of Nigeria have joined the defunct Taliban in adopting an extreme Islamic legal system).

For her part, Daniel said she doesn’t understand what all of the fuss was about,

The particular sentence, the Mohammed sentence, I added in as a last minute thing. I thought it was funny light hearted and I didn’t see it as anything anybody should take seriously or cause much fuss.

Source:

‘Riots writer’ attacks Obasanjo. The BBC, March 12, 2003.