Takedown two! The Yo-Yo Wiki story!
A few weeks ago you I blogged about a takedown notice I got from The Ned Show reguarding some posters that someone had uploaded to Yo-Yo Wiki. Today it happened again and on a much cooler level. Check it out.
The letter is from Nordic Group of Companies Ltd (the eventual owner of Duncan Yo-Yo’s)and they are saying that yoyowiki.com is infriging on two of their copyrights, namely the words “IMPERIAL” and “FREEHAND”. It’s a good point, and the matter of a company defending their trademark is very important, espcailly since Duncan lost their trademark on “Yo-Yo” in 1965 federal case of Donald F. Duncan, Inc. v. Royal Tops Mfg. Co.
There are a couple things that really bother me about the letter, one is that they got the domain wrong and if they really intended to send the letter to the owner of yoyowiki.com they should have sent it to “Wan-Fu China, Ltd. (YOYOWIKI-COM-DOM) P.O.Box CB-11901 Nassau, BS”. The other thing that bothered me was that they assert that they have a trademark on “FREEHAND”. That is total bs. My response as follows.
Well, at least this will give me something interesting to talk about at Minnesota States, which is tomorrow. I hope you can make it.
-Josh
look good
30 Mar 2007 11:36 pm
Neat, I didn’t know that Duncan’s parent company was still located in Baraboo.
01 Apr 2007 12:32 pm
The thing that bothers me most is about the term ‘imperial’ – I have never once heard anyone refer to those shaped yoyos as ‘straight edged’.
They also seem to have failed to have read the many published yoyo books such as Harry Baier’s World on a String (I think that’s the corect title), ‘Splitting the Arom’ book, or many of the other printed articles I have seen regarding the term Imperial.
Luke
01 Apr 2007 12:35 pm
I agree Luke. I think the term we are going to use on yoyowiki is Standard shape, but that hasn’t been officially decided yet.
02 Apr 2007 9:16 pm
To clarify, Nordic asked you to remove the terms from your site and replace them with other terms… They didn’t ask you to simply add a trademark behind the terms, right?
03 Apr 2007 5:51 am
Right. But I was using the term incorrectly. If someone has a store and they are selling a Duncan Imperial TM, then they should have the TM after it to indicate it is a trademark.
03 Apr 2007 6:21 am
I think you make the assumption that Freehand is not trademarked because you could not find it in the USPTO database. The USPTO Database has a lot of holes in it, this is why people still have to go to Washington to research trademarkes (And patents for that matter). This being said, it may not be trademarked, but it not being in that database is not firm evidence of it not having a legal trademark.
Actually they don’t need a tm, they could represent it as a registered tradmark (R) – Circle R, if it were a service mark (it is not) it could be an SM instead of a TM. I’ll try and look at an imperial today at work.
-GReg
05 Apr 2007 5:23 pm
This is exactly the same issue that bankrupted Duncan the first time. I agree with Josh, I’m all for protection of intellectual property, but you have to use some sense when you do it. Maybe the Nordic Group is trying to make Duncan go under again. Why else would they restart the same losing battle? And why not just ask people to use the TM symbol instead of alienating the entire community?