Quote:
Originally Posted by shimmy2
To put things more simply, I started my native girls site NDNgirls in 2009 (ndngirls.com) and there is a knockoff site called ndngirlsbookclub.org that sells overpriced merch and takes "nonprofit" donations like jerryskids/marchofdimes or whatever for underpriveledged natives or something like that. cry me a river i'm black and used to work for their indian casinos. anyhow, theyre robbing my serp rankings for NDNgirls and my point is "I was here first" with the NDNgirls name that is all. And we all know google prioritizes non adult links, but there is some copyright issues at hand here. This goes back to DVD land times I've had the name and domain published
 |
I'm not an attorney, so this is not legal advice, but I think you are in the right.
You'd probably need to register your trademark first to successfully pursue them, but given you have legitimately been using the mark for many years, that seems doable.
Might just be a waste of a few hundred bucks registering the mark and the mark could get denied or could take so long to finalize (because Amazon sellers are flooding the trademark registrations) that the damage is done.
I think it is deeply wrong that some non-adult entity can come along and walk all over your mark and push it down in the search engines, beneath their less legit usage, just because they are non-adult.
FWIW, so long as you don't send out press releases about a legal scuffle, I don't see why that would need to call more scrutiny down. I doubt they are going to make a big public fuss about how they are ripping off the mark of an established adult brand. But, if you have concerns about scrutiny, then, ya know, avoid calling PR attention to it. Doing that makes it harder to settle reasonably anyway. YMMV.
Good luck.