The way trademark law is written, a company must actively defend their mark or else lose it. Sometimes companies HAVE to go on the offensive in order to keep a legal trademark. Lame, I know.

I battled a C & D a while back (non porn) and won. Mostly because my project was non-comercial at the time.

A searchengine will collect a gallery by spidering it's content ( HTML/text and incoming links on that gallery), the only thing we do is show that gallery on a certain search/query by a search proces.

As a searchengine I can't be responsible for content in the galleries it selve, neither as the sites that belong behind that content. That can't be our responsibility

The only thing we are doing is show galleries upon request, if we found a gallery that matches that query we will show it.

We "filter" the galleries out on adaware/pop-ups/trojans and other cheaters so we have a 900.000 galleries left over that we can show the user of our search engine upon request.

Thanks for the notice :winkwink:

you're a search engine listing galleries...your not the bad guy, in fact, you shouldn't be even in the middle of this

if they want someone, go after the gallery maker

look at kazaa, the government said they are not at fault, the file sharers are

Yes that's a good point you have there.

Hope they are IP lawyers.

Search Google for "paris hilton".

that could be a point

This is very interesting.

While there is no doubt in my mind that BMW owns the trademarked name, I'm not sure how far it would carry over to the Internet. If you were trying to pass yourself off as an employee of BMW that might be one thing. But if a picture of their car, which is not owned by them, is in a picture I think you have every right to use the name in the description of the site or meta tags.

I don't think they have a case, but you are facing off against the legal team at BMW. Yikes.

BMW is the "Poor man's Mercedes".
:glugglug

Yes a company like that with so much money and power is worth investigating your options well.. since we still think we did nothing wrong we will have to wait for their answer on our letter.

Probably like one of Acacia's ploys with the 'contributory infringement' becuase of the simple fact that they have links to an alledged infringing site..

lol :glugglug