Forum operator sued for a wrongful username
 

I don't want to spoil the mood, but the following could affect anyone of us:

From Mobileread.com:

Q: Can a private forum operator be sued if one of his members is offending existing laws by selecting a particular user name?

A: The private operator of a German bodybuilding forum received a cease-and-desist letter last Friday for one his forum members using a registered trademark as a user name. The trademark was registered in Germany in 1999 and apparently has never been in use nor is it related in any way to bodybuilding. Nevertheless, the lawyer specified the amount in dispute at 100,000 Euro (~120,000 USD) based on the number of registered forum members (~30,000) and number of posts (~385,000). At no time did the operator commercially benefit from someone displaying the trademark on his forum; his site has been financed solely by Online ads and commissions from an Online store. He received three days (of which two are non-business) time to reconsider, to remove all traces of the trademark on his board, and to end the dispute by paying an agreement and consulting fee of 5,206.31 Euro. Otherwise he would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The operator is currently obtaining legal counsel and evaluating his options.

Sorry but this makes me laugh. No court in europe would fall for this. The max would be that the member must change his username.

Can I have my named changed to Microsoft?

Its utter rubbish - You cannot force a member to even change their username by law Marco...

Satan

Sending out cease-and-desist letters in Germany has been going on for quite some time now. One example is a guy who holds a trademark on "GMail" ... he never used it for anything practical, yet he forced Google to change Gmail into GoogleMail in Germany.

Note that they are not beeing sued, just threatened to be sued. I get my fare share of cease and desist letters from lawyers, and I just consider them based on common sense. I'm not a lawyer, but if I had to pay a lawyer each time to investigate one of these claims, I'd have to shutdown the forum.

There's a new specialty of internet lawyers now days, they track "keywords", and issue cease and desist letters to scare webmasters into compliance, and the end result they hope is that their clients get a better ranking on search engines.

In some cases they have a point, but in most cases, they just want to bully themselves into the top spot in search engines, without valid claims to brand name or copyrights.

A username serves the purpose of an alias/nickname, the idea of a trademark is to title a product/object/entity/compnay, yes .. i see the resemblance now .. [/sarcasm]

- Zero Tolerance

I want to change my name to Jelsoft

I just remembered, theres actually a charity organisation called 'Zero Tolerance' and a porn-industry called 'Zero Tolerance', how come i don't get a letter from them +++++ing at me? :(

- Zero Tolerance

True but remember that in this case the person is asked to pay more than 5,000 USD within three days in order to not being sued.

Doesn't sound right to me, if they knew they could sue and win, they wouldn't offer a cheap way out, personally i think there trying to scare the owner of the forum and get them to pay up, so it doesn't lead to a court issue.

I'll have a word with my legal advisor and see what he says.

- Zero Tolerance

It will get thrown out of any EU court. It is not legal to trademark a word, which is what this company is attempting to do - bar all use of this word. The most the company could do is pursue the individual for fraud, if they claimed to be a representative of the trademarked company.

Lol, that was funny. And to stay on topic, I don't think major corperations would care if a nobody has there company name as a username...

Ditto. I think there are some people out there who register doubtful trademarks just to do that.... threaten to sue people and hope that they will pay a high fee for not being sued.

It's called extortion, and the company in question will probably find themselves getting in some legal trouble over this, rather than the forum owner, who could and probably should countersue if it goes to court.

"True but remember that in this case the person is asked to pay more than 5,000 USD within three days in order to not being sued." That may be considered as extortion. Sounds like it to me.

It is a common practice in Germany. They called it legal fees.

a good way to protect your name, get maximum publicity for free and maybe get some compensation!