lets all ban BMW, that will teach 'm :ak47:




Good luck in the fight :thumbsup

It is their responsibility to protect their trademark. If they don't, it becomes public domain and they lose it. So they legally *have* to tell people to stop using their name for commercial purposes without their permission. *shrug* Using copyrights in metatags seems a little unneccessary to me, but I guess you could just say "luxury car" instead of "BMW".

You sure know what you are talking about : ) They are representing our case in this matter .

Thanks for your comment.

That sucks. Hope everything gets straightened out.

some interesting links to keep up to date:

Dutch :

http://www.telegraaf.nl/i-mail/14709...blokkeren.html

US:

http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041013bmwporn/

Okay . . . first off there is no way that an image is going to give a search result.

If I take a picture of my bike, and someone does a search for Harley-Davidson, that picture is not going to come up.

It is pretty obvious that anyone including BMW in the Meta tags is attempting to get traffic to their porn site by grabbing BMW traffic.

Now, if it is a gallery titled "Czarina shits on a BMW" then okay, but if someone is throwing in BMW in their keywords or alt tags, it is the same thing as someone including Disney.

I can see their point

You've been doing an excellent job playing the media. Yahoo FP would have been awesome, but who am I to say so...

Anyways, I really hope and expect you to win this case. Keep us posted.

Hi baddog I think the case in this matter is more that you don't want to be sewed for showing brands in your galleries/text/pictures.

And that you should have freedom as a searchengine to show lists on relevance, and if somebody made the effort to make a gallery for a specific query we shall list it, when a relevant search is done, as long as that is possible.

you lost me. If someone takes a picture that has a BMW in it, there is no way that any search engine is going to be able to identify the picture as being one of a BMW

see your story was picked up by http://www.fleshbot.com/

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