Received my first cease and desist...
 

...and it's for a link in a spam comment I never got around to deleting.

Site A is claiming trademark infringement because a link in a comment on one of my sites has their name while the url points to that of a competitor.

I am apparently engaging in "unauthorized marketing" here.

Now, I should have deleted the comment spam, but it was human written and relevant to the post, so I let it pass. I have no skin in the game, I'm not getting paid for the link so I probably would've deleted it if asked nicely.

Anyone ever get into legal trouble for linking to the wrong site? Link to playboy going to penthouse, that sort of thing? Seems a bit of a stretch.

Bump and good luck.

We are dealing with a company in Scotland that just reverse hijacked a dictionary word domain from us. We had it for 14 years. In the process of filing an action on the US side.

Corporations are swinging their big dicks around to see how far they can push things.

It's unfortunate that they didn't ask nicely. It is, however, pretty much what trademark is for - you're not allowed to misleadingly use someone's mark to sell a competing product. If the link is misleading, using someone's name but actually delivering a competitor's product, it's infringement. A lot of people claim infringement when it's not (like using playboy.yoursite.com to promote Playboy is probably legal), but this sounds like actual infringement.

Are YOU responsible for infringement on your site that you didn't post? Maybe, maybe not. Now that you've been informed about it, that leans more toward "yes". Kind of like DMCA - a host isn't liable for copyright infringement until they are duly notified of it. Once notified, they must take appropriate action.

Yes, I about figured that. But my site isn't selling anything, it's a case of me writing a post about say, facebook's IPO and someone replying in a comment "yeah facebook sucks" with a link to myspace anchored to the word facebook.

On the one hand, it would be defending an almost worthless spam comment but on the other I don't like being bullied.

How are you being bullied? It sounds like a boilerplate C&D about an issue that you don't care about. Remove the spam, move on with your life.

Actually I'm not sure they want just the comment gone or the whole post removed, I should probably ask them to clarify.