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How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.
- Timothee 13y ago"Even if it is a meritless suit like this one" This statement lacks arguments supporting it. DOZ is "Search and Social Media Marketing done by professionals" according to their website, and Moz is "Software and Community for better Marketing". IANAL but I feel like there could indeed be confusion between the two, especially considering DOZ was CapSEO before, and Moz, SEOMoz. So now it's a matter of trademarks and specifically timeline on who was first, but the details are not provided in the post.
- mindcrime 13y agoWow, Moz does not come out looking good here. Doz and Moz are not the same word, don't mean the same thing (I'm not even sure either word actually means anything) and are only similar in the most superficial possible way. Moz should quit fvcking around with lawyers and filings and trademarks and whatever legal bullshit and just focus on innovating and being better at what they do.
- mindcrime 13y agoThat said, I'm going to file an official trademark registration for our brand shortly. We've been using it for a couple of years and should be pretty safe, but just in case somebody comes along and tries to start something... A USPTO trademark application costs ~275.00 USD for one mark and one class of goods, so it's not a tremendous expense. Might as well go ahead and go for the extra protection of having a registered trademark... "better safe than sorry" right?
- benatkin 13y agoThat's what they asked doz to do. From the article: > I understand why you're upset. This is not the kind of thing you want to worry about. You want to be building product and getting customers. Not disagreeing about trademark law. I'm very sorry that we're in this situation. Isn't it ironic?
- eridius 13y agoThey actually are quite similar words, for companies which it seems are engaged in the exact same business. I can easily imagine how someone, not familiar with either company, might hear of Moz and, later, mistakenly believe that the company they heard about was Doz (or vice versa). Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it. So although the case that Moz and Doz are similar isn't particularly strong, it seems close enough that I'm not surprised Moz is taking this action.
- mindcrime 13y agoThey actually are quite similar words Only in that they both end with "oz" and sound nothing alike, don't share any common meaning, and have no other obvious connection. Personally, I don't see how anybody could ever confuse those two words. Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it. "any" risk? OK, great, there is a slight, however improbable, risk that somebody could confuse "Fogbeam" and "Moz". After all, we both do something related to computers and both words do contain an "o". So maybe Moz should attack us next?
- eridius 13y agoOnly in that they both end with "oz" and sound nothing alike, don't share any common meaning, and have no other obvious connection. Personally, I don't see how anybody could ever confuse those two words. Right, because everybody has perfect memory of everything they've heard in the past. No wait, it's actually quite the opposite. People have crappy memory, especially for things they're not already familiar with. Neither word has any meaning to an English speaker, but they sounds very similar. I can easily imagine how someone might get confused. If someone else launched a company "Fogdeam", which sold similar software to yours, surely you'd go after them.
- mindcrime 13y agoIf someone else launched a company "Fogdeam", which sold similar software to yours, surely you'd go after them. I don't know for sure that we would. But I'd argue that, being a longer word, you get more confusion with the one character change, since any one character changes a smaller percentage of the overall word. The position of the character definitely matters to. For example, in your "fogdeam" case, I'd say it's iffy. But if somebody launched Dogbeam, I doubt the thought of going after them would even enter my mind. This is all, of course, assuming that they didn't also use a similar logo and similar messaging, etc.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- xelipe 13y agoDoes Moz also claim a trademark for Woz? Moz and Woz are very similar, especially if you are dyslexic.
- donohoe 13y agoI suspect Woz does not do much SEO - so he is safe. For now.
- velodrome 13y agoWhat about Moz and Mozilla? Mozilla uses "moz": -moz-box-sizing, -moz-zoom-in, -moz-appearance Would this be ok too? IE, IE Analytics
- JungleGymSam 13y agoNot ever caring about SEOmoz I always thought they were an arm of Mozilla until recently. :|
- dohertyjf 13y agoNote: definitely worth reading the comments, especially from Sarah Bird (COO at Moz), and the Inbound thread and comments - http://www.inbound.org/articles/view/how-seomoz-sent-us-a-takedown-notice http://www.inbound.org/articles/view/how-seomoz-sent-us-a-ta...
- benatkin 13y agoSo apparently you worked for seomoz, and maybe you currently work for moz. Why not disclose that? http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfdoherty http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfdoherty Those comments don't make seomoz look any better. Look at the date when doz.com was purchased.
- dohertyjf 13y agoI'm a Global Associate for Moz and I work for Distilled, who took over Moz's consulting business when they went fulltime in SAAS. edited because I was a jerk Next, doesn't matter when the domain was purchased. What matters is the date that the trademark, or the intent to use a trademark, was filed.
- benatkin 13y agoI never said that you denied it. I said that you failed to disclose it in your comment. My earlier comment was just a friendly reminder but since you went uppercase on me I'll add that you should know better because of the industry you work in.
- nathas 13y agoA very important snippet from the comments from Sarah Bird (COO of Moz) > So, I did what I would want someone to do for me. In January, I called him to give him a personal heads up that we had a problem, that the brand felt too close for us. I told him we had a registered intent-to-use, and that we were planning on launching soon, just like him. I asked him to use a different brand for his future product or that we would have to cancel his mark. He explained to me that his product is different enough from ours that there wouldn’t be confusion. I urged him to talk to his lawyer and get independent advice before he launched his product.
- pseudonym 13y agoThat actually makes me more disinclined to use Moz-- this isn't a snap-retort by an overeager in-house lawyer looking to earn their fee, this is the COO claiming that "Doz" is a trademark violation because it ends on "oz". It's flat-out depressing, and giving overt hints about "Change your name or we'll sue" ahead of time doesn't make this any better.
- nathas 13y agoI just feel that shifts from a "we're going to legally bully you" to "cmon, we let you know". If someone were to get a notice saying, "Hey, we're going to drop a bomb on you in 3 months. You might want to leave." and continues to live there stubbornly, then complains a bomb got dropped on them, whose fault is it? Clearly it doesn't mean you didn't get a bomb dropped on you, but it kind of nullifies your right to complain about it.
- masklinn 13y ago> whose fault is it? The fault of the guy who dropped the bomb? > it kind of nullifies your right to complain about it. No? If you believe the "bomb" is bullshit bullying and there is no cause for you to leave, why would you leave?
- pseudonym 13y agoThere's a difference between "fault" and "blame" that's not easily expressed in the english language, but I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on your analogy. If someone is going to do something of questionable legality and warns you about it beforehand, does that make it "more legal"? I'll bet you think that people in high-crime areas should "just move out if they don't want to get mugged", too. But here, I have an analogy too: I decide, say in January, that I want to change my company name from "Foobaz" to "Baz". Over the next 6 months, I go out to a bunch of startups named "Caz", "Faz", and "Jaz", and say "Hey so you might want to change your name because I'm going to change my company's name to Baz and I'm totally going to drop a legal hammer on you if you don't because I can afford it and you can't". After those 6 months are up, I change my name, and then flip around and start suing because they "didn't take my warning". The logic here is questionable at best.
- sergiotapia 13y agoGod damn lawyers with their god damn copyright crap. Eh, you get what I mean. I'm disgusted by this behavior. What happened to innovate?
- examancer 13y agoIt's a trademark issue, but I agree petty IP issues are far too often standing in the way of innovation.
- andrewdumont 13y agoPulling over my comments on the matter from Inbound.org. Anji mentions a partnership in his post that I wanted to put come context behind. > When Anji reached out to us initially, they were CapSEO. At the time, I had no idea Doz existed, or that CapSEO was rebranding. As Anji and I talked, the discussion was around the functionality of CapSEO, which I saw as complementary. Later the discussion moved to their plans to rebrand to Doz, with a fuller focus on inbound marketing services (and software). This too is complementary, but not with the brand of Doz, as Sarah alluded to. There's obvious confusion and brand dilution of Moz that can come as a result, and it's our duty to protect our trademark. I think it's important to have this context. It feel into our lap with no other option than the action we took, we didn't seek this out. We've taken every step to be transparent into why, and hope, still, that we can resolve this in a civilized manner. I've spent the past 8 years of my life doing startups, the last thing we want to do is derail a startup from their mission.
- unreal37 13y agoI think this blog post, and some of the facts that seem to be missing from it (as Andrew outlined above), shows that doz.com is trying to get people on their side without being entirely transparent. Which is a shame. Their argument dilutes when the moz.com people can come out with significant corrections to the facts. That said, come on - moz.com (which you JUST changed to) and doz.com? I think you had other options than the "we're going to cancel your trademark" route.
- rooshdi 13y agoMozilla could give the same obvious confusion and brand dilution argument you're making for Moz, but they're not.
- masklinn 13y agoEven more so because moz's boss is on record citing Mozilla (and DMOZ, which got it name because it originally was Directory.MOZilla.org) as source of the MOZ part of the original SEOmoz. Part which is now the only thing left: http://moz.com/blog/what-does-the-moz-in-seomoz-mean http://moz.com/blog/what-does-the-moz-in-seomoz-mean
- coldcode 13y agoCheck out all the variations on http://?oz.com http://?oz.com. Will you sue all of them for confusion? 3 letter word trademark arguments are pretty lame. Actually some of the ?oz.com sites are pretty bizarre.
- jwdunne 13y agoIt's not just the similarity of the name at play here. It's also the industry and DOZ is very close. DOZ and MOZ sell inbound marketing software and they both seem to have a lean towards SEO (or grew from there). I had a quick look at Doz and although its different there is some crossover which makes the product sound and look as good as it does.
- ssharp 13y agoI think it has to do with the fact that Moz and Doz are in the same industry. If I run Poz.com and I sell dog products (I realize the real Poz.com doesn't), I probably won't get a letter.
- jennita 13y agoIt's not just the name. Doz in and of itself has no meaning similar to Moz. The issue is the combination of name + tool focus.
- dohertyjf 13y agoJen you might want to disclose that you work for Moz :-) Full disclosure: I'm Jen's friend.
- macspoofing 13y agoYou're a good friend.
- jennita 13y agoHah sorry about that. I've been open in this thread that I work there, should have mentioned it again. :)
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- akg_67 13y agoVery interesting. If Moz and (D)oz are close, how about Moz and Moz(illa)? Lets start out as SEOmoz and when we become big enough, we can change our name to Moz so that Mozilla doesn't come after us when we are small. As SEOMoz has changed the name to Moz, may be Doz want to rename to SEODoz. What a racket!
- seodoz 13y agoI was about to register the domain but looks like someone has been using seodoz.com for quite a while. Hilarious!
- akg_67 13y agoI wonder when Moz was SEOMoz, did they go after SEODoz too? I don't know much about SEO, so I don't know similar they are. But if Moz as SEOMoz didn't pursue similar action against SEODoz, I don't believe they should be doing same as Moz with Doz. The unfortunate situation is that due to small size of Doz, the cost of litigation will be prohibitive for Doz otherwise SEOMoz vs SEODoz will be a good point in litigation. What disappoints me most is a companies that as a startup expect to be treated nicely by larger ones, start to behave similar to larger one when they become large themselves.
- nathas 13y agoMozilla and MOZ provide pretty different products. If your in a different category, it's often not "reasonable". It's the same with Mojang's "Scrolls" vs Bethesda's "Elder Scrolls". It's silly, but because they're both in the video game category, it was a problem. If someone sold a product named "Scrolls" that was a gummy candy that looked like a scroll, it would probably be fine. The law is unfortunate either way.
- pseudonym 13y agoIf you're going to paint with a wide brush, "SEO Software" and "Browser Software" fall under "Software" in the same way that "Sandbox RPG Video Game" and "TCG Video Game" fall in the category of "Video Game". I feel there's not an actual likelihood of confusion in either case, but I would argue that there isn't one between Moz and Doz either.
- benatkin 13y agoI don't think there's a conflict at all, and I hope the trademark office and/or the courts get it right. If you want to protect against indirect competitors rhyming with you, please pick a name that's longer than one syllable.
- Ryan_Watson 13y agoIn trademark law, a mark can be "Confusingly Similar." Doz differs from Moz, but it may still infringe on Moz's trademark. Because Doz has a similar spelling and operates in the same industry as Moz, it may lead a "reasonable person" to believe the trademarks are related. The court will hold that Doz infringed on Moz's trademark if a reasonable person would find the two confusingly similar.
- mindcrime 13y agoSo, let's look at other three letter words that differ in only one character and see if a reasonable person would find them to be overly similar: fog - dog. No. bet - get. No. top - pop. No. foo - moo. No. It's easy to say "oh, they're only one letter different" but when you're talking three letter words, that one letter carries a lot of weight, IMO. In fact, I'd argue that something like the "macrosoft" / "microsoft" example would be a better example of something that could legitimately be confusing (albeit still a stretch) than "moz" / "doz".
- benatkin 13y agoA reasonable person should see that by picking such a short of name they've forfeited their right to be nitpicky about pronunciation. My name's Ben, I've very often thought someone said Ben when they actually said something else. I don't get mad at them for saying something that sounded like "Ben". If my name was Prometheus I would have people say similar things much less often. Seomoz certainly could have chosen a more complex name.
- Ryan_Watson 13y agoDoz and Moz operate in the same industry and the use of Doz would most certainly trip the reasonable person standard for confusing similarity. If "Doz's" attorney had performed a 30 min trademark search with the USPTO "Doz" would have been advised to choose a different name.
- Kiro 13y agoI will cancel our SEOmoz account tomorrow.
- chopsueyar 13y agoWill you sign up with doz.com?
- MrBlue 13y agoYUP!
- mtarnovan 13y agomight do the same
- MartinCron 13y agoThere's a particular irony that the Moz folks think that the Doz name is too similar to be allowed, when they're using an abbreviation for Mozilla that has been around for years and years.
- ValentineC 13y agoHeh, as someone who's only heard about Moz/SEOmoz recently, I did think that they were related to Mozilla in some way. On the other hand, it could be trademark law that's screwed up, because I understand that there may be dilution at stake if they don't defend their trademark.
- MartinCron 13y agothere may be dilution at stake if they don't defend their trademark I don't buy it. Give me an example of a company that lost trademark protection because they merely allowed another company with a similar name to exist and I'll eat my hat.
- masklinn 13y agoAnd it's not really a similar name. You can't even mistype moz to doz.
- chopsueyar 13y agoNot a Dvorak keyboard user, eh?
- Afforess 13y agoIt doesn't matter, you have the responsibility to defend your trademark at every opportunity. If in the future, the court looks and sees that you didn't try to defend your trademark, even in grey or obviously incorrect cases, they could decide that it was no longer a trademark. Trademark laws suck.
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- pron 13y agoThey should compromise and get it over with: If SEOmoz think the Doz brand is truly a problem for them, they should pay Doz a fair sum to abandon their trademark.
- Sujan 13y agoSlightly off topic, but does it feel 'fishy' and 'unfair' to anyone else that this was published 2 days after the rebranding was announced?
- djim 13y agoi don't think this is off-topic. this was this first thing that popped into my mind as i read this article. Moz is in the wrong here, legal or not.
- Sujan 13y agoHuh? I meant wrong by the Doz guys doing this blog post for link bait. I think Moz has every (legal and moral) right to what they did.
- sososocurious 13y agoHey SeoMoz, Guck Off
- programminggeek 13y agoHere's my favorite part, moz was originally probably used because SEO's favorite directory was/is the open directory project or just "dmoz" as it is known to SEO's. And, in the early days, a great SEO strategy was to volunteer to manage/moderate a category, so that it would be easier to get your own or clients' sites approved. I'm not sure if Rand was one of those SEO people playing that game, but it's ironic that "moz" came from an open directory and is now fighting about trademarks. What's next? Patent trolling? ;)
- dohertyjf 13y agoHere's a post that Rand wrote about the origin of Moz in SEOmoz - http://moz.com/blog/what-does-the-moz-in-seomoz-mean http://moz.com/blog/what-does-the-moz-in-seomoz-mean EDIT tl;DR based off the [moz] that was so popular years ago that stood for openness and transparency. DMOZ and others are included in this history.
- masklinn 13y ago> tl;DR not based off DMOZ Uh? > We're building off the history of organizations like DMOZ, Mozilla, Chefmoz, etc
- dohertyjf 13y agoBuilding off the history of, yes. The history of openness and transparency, not becoming an admin on DMOZ for the sake of a link from one of the strongest domains on the Internet.
- jack-r-abbit 13y agobut... but... your TL;DR said "Not based off DMOZ" when the actual text does, in fact, say "building off the history of organizations like DMOZ". So, at a minimum, your TL;DR misleads people who didn't read it.
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- ppradhan 13y agowhen google came, i was constantly confusing it with yahoo... because both of the companies have two 'O's in their names. us customers are so dumb. finally, i picked a side and chose to use google. this had nothing to do with the fact that google's product was BETTER. i was simply duped into it. goddammit!
- scrozier 13y agoI'm all for the little guy, and I know this must suck for CapSEO/Doz. But SEOmoz seems to me to have acted above board here. I think Doz erred, and suggest they rebrand and move on.
- unreal37 13y agoI don't think Doz erred. They went out, probably paid 5 digits for the doz.com domain name months ago, but didn't register it as a trademark. And then seomoz goes and rebrands last week and they are caught off guard. If moz wants the doz.com domain, they should pay for it. Why should doz just give it up over such a weak claim?
- gklitt 13y agoI find myself playing devil's advocate against all the hate being slung at SEOMoz in these comments. Coming at this dispute from an impartial viewpoint (never heard of either of these companies before this story), it sounds like it could potentially be a valid case of trademark protection. The two companies sound like they're in a similar industry, and the names are undeniably similar. I'm not that familiar with the specifics of trademark law, so I don't know what the legally appropriate outcome is. But after seeing some of the comments from SEOMoz employees, I would be interested in reading a full response post explaining their side of the story.
- macspoofing 13y agoThe reality is that Moz does seem to have a case. Both companies are in the same industry, probably targeting the same clients. At the very least, it is a grey area.
- notatoad 13y agoIf anything, Doz has a case against Moz. Up until a couple of days ago, Moz wasn't Moz, they were SEOMoz, which is really very different from Doz. now they've changed their name and they're sending C&D letters to existing companies who have similar names to what they changed to? If they didn't want to be confused with Doz, they shouldn't have changed their name to Moz.
- a5seo 13y agoI don't understand why they didn't just offer him $50K to rebrand. That would be both GENEROUS and EMPATHETIC. http://moz.com/about/tagfee#generous http://moz.com/about/tagfee#generous http://moz.com/about/tagfee#empathetic http://moz.com/about/tagfee#empathetic Maybe it should be TAGFEEH +Hypocritical.
- seodoz 13y agoWhat else do you expect from someone that gave his wife a brain tumor.
- just2n 13y agoI have decided to rename my seach engine company from SEARCHMoogel to Moogel (pronounced "moogle") and file a trademark lawsuit against Google for being too similar. I'll let you know how it goes. I think we have a winning argument, here.
- rajahafify 13y agoIts funny to see Moz employee defending their company. This is HN. Most people here is highly opinionated and most has made up their mind. Nothing you say can ever justify what your company did. Just do what Opera did and take back your lawyer letter. Don't make this mess any bigger and you'd do fine. If you want, you can prove that Moz can do SEO better than Doz. SEO is irrelevant these days though. Product is what matters
- andrewdumont 13y agoI want people to understand the why, that's why I'm here. My goal isn't to convince people to change their mind. The truth of the matter is that we were put into a difficult position, and with the information we had, this was what we viewed as our only course of action.
- lingben 13y agothis is a straw-man argument, no one 'forced' you to do anything, a decision was made and it was the wrong one now you have two choices, double down or retract and learn from the mistake
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- carlsednaoui 13y agoMoz employees, it would be useful if you mentioned that you're associated with Moz when commenting on this thread.
- nhebb 13y agoI know that HN has ring detection for up votes, but how about down votes? As of this writing, this post is only 1 hr old and has 98 points (which is higher than many of the posts currently above it) and 105 comments. yet it's dropping fast. It's a bit suspicious.
- jot 13y agoDisclaimer: I once paid for three months of SEOMoz How different would this thread be if it were Google, Microsoft, Salesforce or some billion dollar company that decided to launch an Internet marketing brand at Doz.com? SEOMoz's openness has helped dozens of startups with posts like this: http://moz.com/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-story-metrics-and-future http://moz.com/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-st... You can't get much nicer than that to your competitors short of giving them money. IIRC the deck included there, from over a year ago, hints at future use of the Moz brand too. Just because they're bigger than the company behind Doz.com doesn't mean we have to jump to the conclusion that they are the bad guys here. Their lawyer even went to the unnecessary trouble of offering to help doz.com which might have meant financially given a more dignified response.
- chopsueyar 13y agoRemember Facebook having a problem with other *book sites? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635489
- rajahafify 13y agoI hate it when I download chromium on linux and gets a Raiden clone though.
- davemel37 13y agoI wonder if there is precident with Three Letter Trademarks, where almost any variation can sound similar. (perhaps this is an argument for a longer brand name that Three letters.)
- jhonovich 13y agoPerhaps NBC can block ABC under the same grounds?
- MichelleRobbins 13y agoFirst use (actual use, not intent to use) in commerce matters. A lot. And it seems like Doz has that. Also, they already own their mark (they did register it, seems there's confusion on that in this thread too). I know a guy that deals in this kind of thing literally every day - and after reviewing the marks and filings at uspto he says it's a pretty long shot that Moz will get the Doz mark removed. (actually he said "no way will Doz lose their mark") So unless those first use facts aren't actual facts....well I reckon we'll all wait and see how this plays out. Someone somewhere in this thread asked for an example of a similar situation. I can personally speak to that. Long ago and far away I worked at a software company and we developed a web based traffic analytics platform - pre webtrends even! Anyhoo we didn't register the mark for it (young!) and we were contacted by someone who was trying to get their mark (same exact product name, similar functionality - a web traffic analytics program) registered. They told us we had to stop using the name, blah blah blah because they owned the trademark. Well, they actually didn't - yet. And we had first use in commerce. So we opposed their application, it was denied, we filed ours (which they of course opposed), but we ultimately owned the mark. Solely because of first use in commerce. I don't know every detail of this unfortunate scenario, but from what I've read here and on the blog post, it's not at all a slam dunk for Moz. And it's unfortunate that they, and the Doz folks are having to spend time, energy and money on this.
- mac88 13y agoThis story gave me some inspiration for a short parody… The Downfall style http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cqGKDInUh0w http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c...
- MrHater 13y agoMy comments from inbound.org (co-founded by Rand Fishkin) keep getting deleted... and I'm following their guidelines, too. So I've been taking screengrabs - here's the latest: http://oi40.tinypic.com/2uyrluu.jpg http://oi40.tinypic.com/2uyrluu.jpg TAGFEE? What a sad joke.