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Railroad Alleges Dilution By Law Firm's Commissioned Painting:
A law firm representing railroad workers commissioned, among others, the image above, which depicts a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train. BNSF protested the usage alleging dilution. Demand letters and response linked to in this article from Public Citizen Litigation Group (which is representing the law firm).
Wal-Mart loses case for control of boycottwalmart.com | The Register:
The world's largest retailer Wal-Mart has failed in its attempt to gain control of the web address boycottwalmart.com. An arbitration panel has ruled that it was unlikely that visitors would be confused and think that it was a Wal-Mart site.
Domain name disputes are settled by the arbitration panel of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). That body has ruled that Wal-Mart cannot have control of the disputed domain.
The domain is controlled by Traffic Yoon of South Korea, a company which put up no defence in the case. Wal-Mart argued that the domain name was "confusingly similar" to its own addresses, which is not permitted.
"Since [Wal-Mart's] mark is embedded in the disputed domain name, it is hard to say there is no similarity, but finding that the disputed domain name is similar to the Complainant’s marks is not sufficient," said the WIPO decision. "The critical question in this Panel’s view on this aspect of the Policy is whether the similarity is “confusing”."
Google ducks a legal bullet | Perspectives | CNET News.com:
In the mostly uncharted territory of Internet jurisprudence, Google's policy of selling keywords has won a legal reprieve--at least for now.
A recent court ruling says Google is within its rights to include Internet links from competitors to a trademark holder when people search on the corporate name.
In a trademark lawsuit, computer franchiser Rescuecom had complained that when people typed its name into the Google search engine, the results would include URLs from competing Web sites. While U.S. District Court Judge Norman Mordue accepted the allegations in the trademark lawsuit Rescuecom filed against Google as true, he still dismissed the case.