Help internet archive
-
Hi can anyone help me. I am trying to track information from sites. I am at the moment got solicitiors involved ref trade mark of a name and we are trying to prove that this name was being used before the trade mark application.
A company has gone ahead with a trade mark in full knowledge that this is a common name and we have been told if we can prove that the name was being used before it was registered then we can knock out the trade mark.
We have been told there is an internet archive but i cannot find one, can anyone please let me know how i can look at sites from before 2010 and see about if they were using this word to help our case.
-
Thanks for that. This guy is very slippery and it is bad news that he is allowed to get away with stuff. Our legal team have said that because we have no proper proof of him attacking our site although they and we know what he is doing, we cannot take him to court. We are trying to see if we can take him to court for false alligations to our hosting company because he gave his name to them. But with other companies he has been using different names.
This is costing us thousands of pounds and it seems we are getting no nearer to stopping him or sorting it out.
We had to change the content on our site because he was copying it and then passing it on as his own and sending it to people who have sites that represent him, so our rankings dropped and while the legal team were sorting it out we took the choice to re write a lot of the content.
There needs to be more guidelines in place to stop all this, but there is some good news as the guy who is trying to off load franchises is getting a bad reputation.
We got into a forum that is just meant for his franchisee people and we got in by just registering and found he was calling our company and making recommendations on how to stop us from getting customers and when our legal team made him aware of this, he went mad and said it was wrong of us to be on his forum and he quickly put a lock on it.
It would be nice if this was an honest world
-
If you can imagine Diane, it gets worse.
I have a client who has offered multiple brands for many years, dating back as far as 2002. A distributor whom she sold products to noticed two of the brands were not properly trademarked. The distributor successfully trademarked one brand, and was months into the application process of the second brand when the issue was discovered.
This distributor actually filed a trademark infringement complaint with Google and removed all of my client's advertisements, and then filed a trademark complaint with her host forcing her to remove the products from her store. Once a trademark is actually granted, the process is much harder to address.
To deal with the granted trademark, a formal process called a Cancellation had to be filed. I completed the paperwork and have confidence my client will win eventually, but this distributor actually hired an attorney and clearly intends to drag out the process as long as possible. This entire time he has the benefit of owning the trademark which prevents anyone else from selling or advertising the product. Imagine a product sold by dozens of distributors now only being sold by a single entity. Once the issue is resolved, legal action can be pursued against him, but clearly the type of person to take this action is very shady.
The second trademark was caught in time to where an Opposition notice was filed.
In order to receive the trademark, the applicant had to sign under penalty of perjury a document stating he is the mark's owner and has no knowledge of it's use in commerce by others. Clearly signing that statement was fraudulent and it can be used in a lawsuit, but this is a long process spanning years and should be avoided.
My strongest advice is to always register any marks used in your business, and to monitor the Register where new trademark applications are posted. You need to watch not only for exact matches, but marks which look or sound similar to a mark you own.
-
Hi thanks for that and thank you egol for the website address. It seems a company who has registered this trade mark done so in the full knowledge that it was imoral. It is wrong that the trade mark office is not more widely out there, what i mean is, anyone can secretly register a trade mark in the UK and it seems it is hard to have it stopped.
We have a company who we did not class as our compeditiors as they were not in the same class as us, but because we were getting all the customers coming to us, they were not happy about this and started doing things that were not nice, like trying to reduce traffic to one of our sites, making false aligations, trying to have articles removed from sites, basically i am sure they have a horse in their back garden.
We have now a legal team in place to sort this out, but we have been told that we have to show companies have been using the trade mark name before they registered it, and then it can be dropped. So we are hoping to find these companies and hoping like us that they have been using that name for some time.
It seems terrible that a company can be allowed to do what they have been doing such as attacking our site and trying to cause dead links.
-
Hi Diane.
I would add that trademark law is a complex field. The specific detail which is the deciding factor for a case with an unregistered trademark is "first use in commerce". The use of a term in and of itself is not significant unless there is a clear commercial intent.
The above information is specific to the United States; however, there seems to be a lot of similarity with trademark laws throughout the world.
-
Search google for "internet archive". Click on first result.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Re-direct help
Hello Mozzers, I have a technical question that perhaps someone has experience with and can help with. I currently have 2 e-commerce websites: SITE-A.COM (original site) & SITE-B.COM (new site) SITE-B.COM is the newer site that has a lot of new products and new features and great content and is very user friendly. We are thinking about funneling all of our visitors and traffic to SITE-B.com since it is the better experience for the users ... the question is this: If we want to 301 redirect all traffic from Site-A.com to Site-B.com ... where do we initiate those redirect requests? Would it be on the server for Site-A.com? If so, would i have to keep that server up and running forever if i don't want to lose the re-directs? Also, how do i do this properly without violating Google's guidelines? Any help is appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Help! Website has lost all DA since being 301'd
Hi, We have redirected a small WP website to a new site and domain and it has lost all DA and PA. Does anyone know if there's a fix for this? Would reverting back to the old domain help? We redirect www.northcornwallgardens.co.uk to cornishlawns.co.uk Thank you James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Junk/ Spammy Links Help
I am trying to get rid of all of the junk/spammy links from a site. Problem I am running into is OSE is only showing 7 links and there are way more than that. Is there a reason for only a few links are showing? How would I go about seeing all the links so I can get rid of them? Thank you in advance, Scott
Technical SEO | | scottdrost0 -
I need help with a PHP canonical URL tags
I found a little difficult for me to do a canonical tag in my PHP. On-Page Report Card We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. I don't know how to tidy my PHP Any suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lnietob0 -
Need Help with MAGENTO - URL rewrite
Hello... Hopefully a Magento expert will stumble across this question and help me out. I have noticed that my site is no longer as prominent as it once was for specific product pages... I am looking for help in rewriting the URL's for the product pages. I want it to have xyz.com/product (which exists if you hard code it into the site) If you wind up on the product by clicking throught the categories the url looks like: xyz.com/category/subcategory/product. Does anyone know how to make it so when you land on a product page it is just xyz.com/product ? My Site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Help with steps to take when fixing cannonical url structure?
I would like to 301 redirect all the variations of my site to a single url but would like some clarification on some issues. I have always been confused about how to handle cannonicalization and hopefully this can clear it up for me and others. This particular site is about 1 year old and gets approximately 15k uniques a month in a great niche. I want to make sure I do this correctly as to not hurt my existing rankings which are quite good. Here is is what I am unsure about. Basically I should pick the best url structure to redirect all the others to correct? What determines what url is best to redirect all the rest to? is it www.domain.com, http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com? Is the best one to redirect to always standard and something I should set up at the beginning of my site? Or is picking the best url to redirect to based on what url starts to rank in google and you then use that one? Should I be going through each of my rankings and seeing what url is ranking in google for each page? On this particular site ALL of my urls in google have no www. or http but instead show up in the SE as domain.com or domain.com/inner-page/html. In that case what do I do? I know the slow way to do redirects. I use my hostgator account and do it in cpanel and do it one by one. Is there a faster way where I can go and make lots of changes at once? Maybe I can choose all the variations and put in the one I want them all to redirect to? After I figure the above out is fixing all of this as simple as redirecting ALL variations to the one I will use moving forward for each page on my site? Then I am done? Thanks again for the help! Jake
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
Will password protecting my test sub-domain help keep the SEs from indexing it?
Hi, all. I'm working in an unfamiliar area here, so I hope someone can tell me if I'm out in left field. I am building a sub-domain called http://test.mysite.com, so that I can upload a client's still-under-construction site while working on it. When completed, it'll go up on his server, replacing his old site. Obviously, I want to ensure that it doesn't get indexed while it's on my test platform. A friend suggested that I password it with htaccess and htpasswd, since we can never be certain the SEs will obey site directives. My question is, what do you think would be the best (and hopefully, simplest) way to accomplish this? I'm no code-monkey, so "simple" is a big plus! Doc By the way, the platform will be Wordpress CMS.
Technical SEO | | Doc_Sheldon0