Rick Schwartz’s ‘forceful’ reaction in a case of trademark abuse, is justified – in my not so humble opinion.
The purpose of registering a trademark is to distinguish oneself and associate products or services with the mark.
When one fails to protect the mark, they risk witnessing it become diluted or generic. Examples from the past, include aspirin and xerox.
People that are not familiar with the hardships of enforcing a mark, might find Rick’s reaction to be ‘over the top‘. But in all truth, he did what he’s entitled to: protected the registered trademark from dilution, by demanding that the offending content be removed.
There is nothing wrong in protecting your digital assets, that define who you are, what you do and how you do it. I had to protect mine on several occasions; Apple was exceptional in removing trademark violations per my request.
Most recently, the Chinese domain auction site, 4.CN, performed their duty per my request as well. Obligatory “thank you” goes out to Shane Cultra, who brought me in touch with the 4.cn president.
Regardless of the footprint of your corporation or business, when you register a trademark you must enforce it when others infringe upon it. If it takes lots of virtual ‘barking’ to catch the attention of the offending party, so be it. All is fair in love, war and domaining.
No doubt he is right in enforcing his “trademark” on Domain King.
But even a domain king must be polite enough to understand that mistakes do happen and should have first reached out directly to the offending party and then (if they did not remove the trademarked words quickly enough) make a huge hue and cry about it on his blog.
Also, the fact that he did not insert a “trademark” sign around his domain king trademark itself shows “purposeful” negligence on the part of the self-proclaimed king.
Savio – I’m fully supportive of this statement as seen below:
Let me be clear, it is not about my trademark. It is about common decency. Could you imagine Fabulous.com or any other reputatble company in the domain industry doing that? Of course not!! So when I hear defenders saying how “Far away” they are or other nonsense it shows a complete disregard for common sense. It is just below the belt bullshit that should not be tolerated or defended by anybody. PERIOD!