Forum operator sued for a wrongful username

[AlexanderT]

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.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

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.

[Logikos]

Can I have my named changed to Microsoft?

[Chris M]

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

Satan

[AlexanderT]

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.

[tamarian]

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.

[Zero Tolerance]

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

[jugo]

I want to change my name to Jelsoft

[Zero Tolerance]

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

[AlexanderT]

Originally Posted by tamarian

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.

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.