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> it wasn't in my 'marketing literature'. It was in your sales site. Your sales site could most validly be referred to as marketing literature. > It wasn't in

> it wasn't in my 'marketing literature'. It was in your sales site. Your sales site could most validly be referred to as marketing literature. > It wasn't in anything user-visible at all. It was visible though, to the search engine at least. And back to the "not marketing literature" point - SEO very much is marketing. Now they might be being a bag of dicks, in this case and more generally, but I don't think those two points you are arguing with are valid at all.

stephenhuey 6y ago
Exactly. A friend went through a bad lawsuit because his business partner did this very thing on their website (my friend didn’t know the business partner was playing that game with a competitor and unfortunately this incident led to their business shutting down).
klyrs 6y ago
Fast forward to today, where Google entertains auctions for first-page listings and happily evicts trademark owners if they don't pay up.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Hey it was a walled-garden sales site, not my own. The same one Hasbro used to market their lame Scrabble game. And SEO is absolutely not 'marketing literature' which is defined as something the customer sees and reads. The word 'Scrabble' did not appear in that. No I think its a contortion to make those arguments.
- dspillett 6y ago
  You could argue that SEO isn't marketing literature, but it is absolutely marketing process just like marketing literature is. > The same one Hasbro used to market their lame Scrabble game. > Unless either Hasbro got the website to release them Or the garden wasn't as walled as you had been lead to believe and the terms were included somewhere visible to search agents and Hasbro knew all about that from their own experience of the site. The association with your app and the mark was certainly visible as there was a direct mapping between the two via the search function. > (in which case they would simply have asked the website to remove them) Perhaps they did but the site said "copyright/trademarking isn't our problem, perhaps have your guys talk to their guys."?

stephenhuey 6y ago

Exactly. A friend went through a bad lawsuit because his business partner did this very thing on their website (my friend didn’t know the business partner was playing that game with a competitor and unfortunately this incident led to their business shutting down).

klyrs 6y ago

Fast forward to today, where Google entertains auctions for first-page listings and happily evicts trademark owners if they don't pay up.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Hey it was a walled-garden sales site, not my own. The same one Hasbro used to market their lame Scrabble game. And SEO is absolutely not 'marketing literature' which is defined as something the customer sees and reads. The word 'Scrabble' did not appear in that. No I think its a contortion to make those arguments.

dspillett 6y ago
You could argue that SEO isn't marketing literature, but it is absolutely marketing process just like marketing literature is. > The same one Hasbro used to market their lame Scrabble game. > Unless either Hasbro got the website to release them Or the garden wasn't as walled as you had been lead to believe and the terms were included somewhere visible to search agents and Hasbro knew all about that from their own experience of the site. The association with your app and the mark was certainly visible as there was a direct mapping between the two via the search function. > (in which case they would simply have asked the website to remove them) Perhaps they did but the site said "copyright/trademarking isn't our problem, perhaps have your guys talk to their guys."?