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Remember the recent discussion around Facebook’s “Face” trademark?
That whole discussion made us remember some rather funny or just plain strange examples of trademarks we’d seen from big players like IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Google in the past. Companies do love their trademarks…
Here are a few of the stranger ones.
Every year, companies find that someone has registered domain names involving their trademarks, or variations of their domain names that are confusingly similar to the original. If a solution can’t be found by talking to the registrant of the offending domain name(s), a formal dispute usually follows.
WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization (an agency of the UN), has an arbitration and mediation center for domain disputes, and they continually publish the results of these disputes, as well as related facts and figures.
We have summarized some of the most interesting data in this article, and we have also tried to figure out the underlying reason for the increase in domain disputes. Well, at least we have a pretty good theory involving Google AdSense…
