eBay have won their suit for trademark dilution against perfumebay.com. Three judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling from September 2005 that the similarity of the two domain names could encourage users to “disassociate the eBay mark with eBay’s services.” The site’s owners have been ordered to get a new name.
Jacquelyn Tran, CEO of Perfume Bay, insists that the name of her website is nothing to do with eBay: she told me in an email that she “envised [sic] a bay filled with ships carrying perfume from every corner of the world”. Ms Tran says that she will fight on: she has already filed an emergency stay of injunction to keep her domain name, and has vowed to take her case to the Supreme Court. I’m sure the publicity will garner her many, many more customers.
5 Responses
Perfumebay today…Tamebay tomorrow…
oh boy… this should help her business sales for sure, but eBay will fight to the death for anything they think is theirs.
I had a domain with ebay in the name and I used it for over a year with no problems until their lawyers found out it existed. It didn’t take them long to send a lovely cease order to us.
Home tame……..bay doesn’t fall prey. Scott
Since the English language has an significant amount of words that end in the silent “e”, folks should start branding more sites like eLand, eWorld, and other “e” and common suffixes and then hire corrupt corporate lawyers to go around suing all the sites that end with “e”. *shaking head*
EBay does not own the English word “Bay” and any site that chooses to sell a product that happens to end with a silent “e” should not have to deal with this nonsense. These judges were obviously not thinking or were paid handsomely. I propose that all the sites that are obviously not trying to take advantage of Ebay’s branding (Perfume Bay is an obvious one, I’m sure there are others) should band together and start a counter lawsuit against EBay since their use of the word “Bay” has nothing to do with its English meaning, and they have to right to take away other companies’ right to use that word in its proper English context to brand their products.
I suppose they could call ebay direct using ?
https://phonebay.com/
🙂
Nice pun in the headline, Sue.