Friday, January 30, 2004

It features a woman's chest

OK, last MeFi link of the day ---

In trademark law, parody is a defense to trademark infringement. Eveready Battery Co. v. Adolph Coors Co., 765 F. Supp. 440 (N.D. Ill. 1991) (holding that a commercial advertisement of a well-known actor in a bunny outfit, banging a drum, was an effective parody of the plaintiff's mechanical toy rabbit advertising character). In the present case, consumers are highly unlikely to be confused as to the source of services for several reasons, including the following:

  1. the domain names are entirely different;
  2. the BOOBLE web site searches only provide content related to Adult web sites, including TGP sites, Adult stores, and Adult-related products like browser cleaners, pop-up filters, etc.; and
  3. the BOOBLE mark is distinct from the GOOGLE mark in that it differs in sound, appearance, commercial impression, and other relevant aspects:
    1. it features a woman's chest;
    2. it uses the phrase, 'The Adult Search Engine;'
    3. it posts a warning that the web site contains explicit content; and
    4. it disclaims any association with Google.com.

Incidentally, if Google's obnoxiousness continues to increase, I may have to jump ship and throw my free Google shirts (acquired through my dept., and acquaintances) into the back of the closet and start using Vivisimo.

BTW, if you've never used Vivisimo: it's a bit slower than Google, but it's definitely better for straight web search, at least when you want to sift through lots of search results. Yes, that's right: I said it's better than Google. OTOH "Vivisimo" is a horrible name --- I actually mistyped it "vivismo.com" the first time, which meant that (ironically) I had to fall back on Google, which intelligently figured out that I had misspelled it. Anyway, Konqueror users can type "vi:search terms" in your location bar; Mozilla/Netscape users will need the Vivisimo search plugin.

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