2004.01.15 11:37 "Re: [Tiff] http://www.libtiff.org/", by Mike Williams

Hi,

You are talking about a registered trademark (R). It takes at least a year to get a registered trademark, and the registration request will be rejected if your lawyer is not responsive, or it is believed that the trademark is already in common use.

Most trademarks are not registered and are denoted with (TM). unregistered trademarks are supported by actual use, and the initial usage date. Unfortunately, defending unregistered trademarks usually takes legal action.

Almost all lawsuits are more painful than can be imagined.

The first step should be determining who the ISP is, and convincing the ISP that their customer is doing something illegal.

I would have thought there could be Copyright claim on the web pages content and/or appearence, since they are exact copies of the original site that they are passing off as their own. Could we at least get them to change the content significantly so they could not pass themselves off as the home of libtiff.

For the conspiracy theorists out there, the "libtiff.org partnersites" make interesting research with whois. keyworddomains.com is also registered to Markus Schnermann, as is strumpfhosen.net. In fact these resolve to the same IP address at the moment, so it looks like they are using libtiff.org as a link farm. The other links are to German registered sites.

It looks like gif.org may also been hijacked - it's last update is July 2003, the around the same time as libtiff.org. It's whois is hidden but its ip address is the same as keyworddomains.com.

So it looks like Markus' business is to scrape web site contents, hijack the domain, and then set up copies with extra links to your own on-line business. Nice.

TTFN

Mike

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.