Williams-Sonoma Sues FriendFinder, Others Alleging Trademark Infringement
 

http://www.xbiz.com/news_piece.php?id=17864

SAN FRANCISCO ? In a move that could have wide-ranging effects for the online adult industry, Williams-Sonoma has filed suit in U.S. District Court, charging a slew of online adult entertainment companies with infringing on the company?s popular Pottery Barn trademark to drive traffic to various ?pornographic? websites.
The federal lawsuit names FriendFinder, Online Marketing Services, Unimaster, Yeticash, Domain Name Systems, Virtual World Holdings AVV, Moniker Privacy Services, Ales Lexico, John Salmond, Ford Jeske, Andrej Korchev, Vladimir Techl and Dorothy Simpson. Believing that there are other infringers out there, attorneys for Williams-Sonoma also reserved the right to add additional defendants.

?The purpose of this lawsuit is to seek damages and injunctive relief to stop defendants from their practice of using and infringing Williams-Sonoma famous Pottery Barn family of trademarks to identify their explicit and graphic pornographic adult websites,? Williams-Sonoma attorney Gregory Gilchrist said.

The suit alleges that the defendants misuse the Pottery Barn trademarks in a variety of ways, including embedding the term ?potterybarnteens? in source code, using ?potterybarnteens? as a domain extension and repeatedly using the term ?potterybarnteens? in copy throughout various websites.

FriendFinder?s attorney, Ira Rothken, told XBIZ his client ?played no role in hosting sites that use the [Williams-Sonoma] marks.?

?FriendFinder is involved because of its affiliate program,? he said. ?The way they drafted the lawsuit is disproportionate and wholly inaccurate. Nevertheless, we intend to cooperate fully and terminate any rogue affiliates.

Rothken added that FriendFinder was disappointed that Williams-Sonoma had not contacted the company prior to filing suit.

?Just like any large affiliate program, such as Amazon.com, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to know where across the world marks are being infringed upon,? he said. ?That?s why it?s important that trademark holders make us aware of any potential problem.?

Rothken explained that in this case, several of the affiliate programs named in the suit operate out of Central and Eastern European countries, making it nearly impossible to determine on a case-by-case basis whether an affiliate is operating in a manner consistent with local law.

Williams-Sonoma has requested a jury trial. The complaint does not specify monetary damages, although it does ask that the defendants be permanently enjoined from using the plaintiff?s trademarks. The suit also seeks a return of any lost William-Sonoma profits as well as the forfeiture of any ill-gotten gains from the alleged misuse of the trademarks.

A representative from Moniker was not available for comment at time of post.

http://www.xbiz.com/pdf/williams_sonoma.pdf

Woah !!

congrats :) :)

haha AFF sucks

Its about time people started protecting their trademarks and copyrights.

I agree with AFF's attorney, the damages are by infringing affiliates, not AFF itself. If they would have contacting AFF directly, I imagine they wouldn't be named in the suit, but of course it adds more merit to a press release when you can drag big companies into the mess.
WG

well, I think how this plays out will be a landmark decision

if they side with williams sonoma then sponsor programs everywhere will actually be liable for their affiliates actions (wow, who da thunk?)

I personally think that EVERY affiliate program should be responsible for anything their affiliates do

contractors are responsible for their contract labor employees, so why aren't affiliate prorgams? affiliates are basically just contract labor

:) :) :) :)

karma is a bitch...serves them right...although i dont think that they will be successfull with the lawsuit..

Interesting.

Imagine a company like Google (Adsense specifically). The internet industry as we know it could easily become crippled by such an action. I think most reasonable judges should agree that in the internet economy that this isn't a feasible solution to make affiliate programs bear the liability on behalf of affiliates.
WG

very true

I guess I just think affiliate programs need to be held more accountable for what their affiliates are doing and how they are promoting that program...AFF specifically, but many others

To me big companies should have people whose job is to check affiliates all day. they should be responsible for them ,they are a reflection of their company.

Am I missing something, or is there actually people out there that search for "pottery barn" teens? Of all the trademarks to infringe, that one seems pretty stupid.

sig spot SECURED

it never ceases to amaze me that companies sue the registrars un-lol.

and secondly, a lot of companies are enforcing their i.p. so any comments saying "it's about time" are ill-informed.

lastly, unjust enrichment is unjust enrichment period.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I guess it will depend upon what level of due diligence the court believes can reasonably be expected of someone involved in a relationship for profit.

Anything is possible, but if this ever gets to court it is hard to imagine sponsors will get away with claiming no responsibility at all. After all there are some similarities with the Perfect 10 suits of a few years ago.

Over and over online porn refuses to tackle issues until as some put it "the sky falls in" and that's crazy since most of us lose money because cowboys are tolerated. Sponsors who choose not to adopt ethical and professional standards unless forced to do so, have only themselves to blame when things like this come down the pike.

I was about to say the same thing. AFF that is how you are suppose to protect your trade mark.

How ironic. AFF will not sue Zango and "adware" companies for using their trademark and Lars says it is not worth it, will cost to much money. But here you have a company that takes it trademark seriously sueing AFF.

The irony.

Wasn't there some big affiliate companies that got nailed a few years back for spam emailing that their affiliates were doing? I believe the sponsor was held liable in that case and paid a lot of money in fines. my memory is bad.

I agree if your company made 100+million in revenue each year you think you could spend a few bucks and hire some full time people to randomly check urls and accounts and actually invistigate complaints..

However such actions would cost the company money if they started banning people, so they would rather play the hear no evil, see no evil, game and pretend they don't know about it.

Some companies don't care where they get their traffic from, they just want to make money, lots of it, so they can increase payouts which are going UP UP UP !

Baby!!!!!!!!!

Excuse me. Are you suggesting that every affiliate program should be actively monitoring every website, owned by every affiliate to a point that they know every Meta and alt tag used by said affiliates?

and no, they are not contract labor

look just dont sell yourself to fall in love with FriendFinder yo....

Why don't we be honest here. If this suit did not mention AFF you would not even be posting about it.

Yeah, and all affiliate programs should pay $.50 recurring to their affiliates. Maybe $2/PPS

Yep, agreed on all points but the old "its the affiliates fault" is not a good defense since in precedent after precedent Programs are clearly responsible for the actions of their affiliates.

In that case, I think Pottery Barn brought it upon themselves. What the hell did they think would happen with a name like that? :1orglaugh

very untrue

I have always been very vocal that I think ALL affiliate programs should be held 100% accountable for what their affiliates are doing

and YES, i think that all affiliate programs should have employees in place to randomly check urls and site of their affiliates..sorry if that offends you oh great one, but that is how I, and many others, feel

but yes, to touch on the topic in the quote, I hate AFF and you are their cheerleader, we all know this...you support their promotion and profit from content/software theft and piracy, I don't..plain and simple

ha, yeah, I have to agree with you on that one

I am their cheerleader? When did that happen?

So, if you think it is AFF's responsibility to actively monitor every site that has a link up to them, to the point that they know what every meta and alt tag has in it at any given time . . . just how much do you think they should be paying affiliates?

You are correct sir. The FTC went after the sponsors and not the spammers.

Maybe this will clean up a little bit of the SE spamming.

I never said actively monitor, and just to be clear I am not talking about just AFF here

I think every program should have 1-3 people that just sit all day and surf their affiliates sites to check to make sure they are within the rules

programs owners should be held just as liable for their affiliates as the affiliate is

excuse me instead of buying the Ferrari that would pay for five 40k a yr people to spot check affiliates all day long.

i still think aff will only have a problem if they directly participated in the seo stuff even though i read the complaint and it says williams sonoma has a belief that aff was involved "directly and indirectly".

also it shows how little regard williams sonoma has for other site owners considering they did not contact aff prior to the suit. that part is very lame.

The concept of due diligence is nothing new and as someone has pointed out, it has already been applied to this industry. It is not a requirement to provide infallible precautions against predictable/known abuses, just a recognition that if you are going to profit from a relationship, you have to take reasonable measures to ensure that third-parties with whom you are involved operate legitimately.

It isn't anyone here you have to convince anyway, but come on, we know that far from attempting to stop abuses which range from scumware, through content theft to misuse of keywords, many sponsors turn a completely blind eye to anything which makes them a buck. You wouldn't even have to search many pages of the average message board to find examples.

Adult webmasters may be used to accepting all that crap, but should it really come as a surprise that the real world is going to bite someone in the ass from time to time?

Now this is fucking funny. I just did a search for " Pottery Barn Teens" and zango popped up with this page:

http://www.teamclickcash.com/zango/potterybarn.jpg

I wonder if Potterybarn allows this type of advertising?

hmmm, guess I missed something here, I thought they were giving away Andrew's used Ferrari, not buying a new one.

ANd I highly doubt 5 people would be enough to go over all the meta tags of every site with an AFF link on it.