Reprinted with permission from CNET News
So there you are, a reputable company or person, and someone else is using your trademarks to direct Internet users to pornographic Web sites.
You file a lawsuit and rush into court seeking immediate relief. Right?
Actually, not always.
Indeed, before asking for legal relief, it is important to line up all of your legal ducks. Otherwise, your first dealings with a judge can be met with a thud. A recent case bears this out.
In a complaint filed last month in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Williams-Sonoma claimed that Online Marketing Services and other companies and individuals were using its Pottery Barn trademarks to direct Internet traffic to sites containing explicit pornographic content, none of which was sponsored or endorsed by Williams-Sonoma. The trademarks allegedly were being wrongfully used in search terms such as potterybarnteen, pottery-barn-teens and pottery-barnteen.
