Cease and Desist
I am very, very pleased to report that I've received my very first cease and desist letter. It comes from a lawyer in San Francisco representing EvolutionArtistsInc. It seems that Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads fame started a site called simply garageband. I suspect that the goal of the site was to help struggling, unknown musicians get some exposure and feedback on their work. I can't be sure. Now it looks like just another corporate-sponsored thing complete with logos from biggies like Microsoft and Budweiser.
How about that. Just what unknown musicians are after, logotypes to put on their kick drum heads!
Well, all kidding and cynicism aside, I'll rewind a year or so. Apple Computer released a nifty little app called GarageBand. Naturally, the wired-in, mac-usin' musicians of the world were more than a little excited about it, and fan-sites started popping up. Among them MacJukeBox, and what evolved to be a larger site, iCompositions. Of course, neither of those sites are using their original names.
MacJukeBox was originally named "GBXchange.com" but it turns out that the folks over at garageband.com, who fancy themselves as a grass-roots organization, have a trademark on garageband and felt that the use of GB infringed upon their trademark. I'm still trying to figure out if they had their lawyers send a letter to the European Union about all those oval stickers; or perhaps if they sent a letter to Wilson Greatbatch Technologies Inc. which uses GB as their stock symbol; or even if they sent letters to any one of these many, many people who Google think are more associated with "GB" than the people at the "grass-roots" site.
iCompositions was originally called GarageBandCreations.com, but they too were sent a letter and asked to change.
What's more is that our friends at the grass-roots organization didn't just sic a lawyer on them demanding them to change the name; indeed they demanded ownership of their domain names. And they rolled over and complied. They gave the domain names to the grass-roots guys with the bigger lawyers.
It was at that point that there were jokes about 'garagebanned' to make a statement about the intimidation that was going around. So I registered the domain garagebandsucks.com. There are many cases where this sort of domain name is ruled as protected by the First Amendment Right to Freedom of Expression, Taubman Company v. Webfeats and Henry Mishkoff being among the more notable. So I made a quick page, and forgot all about it. In fact, it's so old, that it contains links regarding nigritude ultramarine. But I'm getting side-tracked.
Now, it's a year later. The domain registrar automatically renewed the name, and as a promotion, threw in the garagebandsucks.info domain in for free. That's fine. I like free. I didn't do anything with it. Then yesterday I received a letter from a lawyer that informed me of the garageband trademark. Thanks for the info. It's good to know. Their concern is that I might use garageband.info to infringe upon their trademark. Indeed, I'm not infringing upon it. My site clearly states that I have no affiliation with any organization, and I am certainly not selling anything. All of which makes it difficult to infringe upon the mark. The letter also informed me that I was currently not using the domain, and informed me that they will:
anticipate that [I] will continue to cease and desist from using the domain name or any designation comprised of the garageband™ and garageband.com® marks.
What strikes me as the most peculiar, however, is that I've had the garagebandsucks.com domain for over a year — it's active no less — and I've had no complaints about it, nor have I received any informational letters on the topic.
Anyway, I think you get the idea. I have a lot of contempt for this sort of behavior. But I don't know that I am currently in the mood to deal with all the crap associated with it. It's a good fight, and one that I would totally win, but I'm thinking about just selling the domains. Well, I'll sell the .com and throw in the .info for free. That's passing the savings along. ;) I'm actually thinking about selling the domains and the cease and desist letter. It's printed on very nice paper.
- under:
- Life in General
- Posted on
- 2005-02-12
Comments:
wow
That's the first time I've heard of a preemptive copyright infringement attack. It is simply incredible. I say we carefully craft a letter back to them telling them to cease and decist with the threatening letters since you obviously have nothing to do with them and have done nothing to infringe on them in the past with anthing you've done.
wow indeed
I've never heard of it either. I guess "cease and desist" isn't the proper name for it, but they were sure to use that exact terminology in the letter, so I went with it. I suppose technically it's a "hey, heads up there, guy, someone has a trademark on this name" letter, but where's the pizzazz in that?
This article is closed to further commentary. But you can always contact me directly.