What I see is there is the word "ebay" in the domain "perfumebay.com".
Yes, exactly...they feel the sequence of those four letters in anything is there's to claim and own...Chesapeak
eBay (a body of water), Ros
eBay (a native wildflower and herb), Main
eBays (my own planned photo journal of kayaking the coast of Maine), SittingOnTheDockOfTh
eBay (an Otis Redding hit).
My point is that eBay does not own the alphabet. With the exception of my photo journal, all of these existed long before eBay.
So would it be prudent to argue that eBay in and of itself infringed and added to the dilution of the word Bay? And has eBay infringed upon and encroached on the rights of others by restricting the use of the four letter sequence
E B A Y ?
And would the heirs to the founder of Chesapeake Bay, the botanist who named Rose Bay, and the surviving heirs of Otis Redding be entitled to royalties from eBay?
In my opinion, eBay is not only trying to control eBay but also the internet. The internet as it stands now does not allow a space in the URL therefore it must be conjoined words or words separated by a hyphen or underscore.
They, eBay, are so damn concerned about someone using the word
bay or the combination of
ebay yet they could care less about the rights of others. Tiffany and Company recently lost a ruling in attempts to get eBay to stop listing Tiffany pieces as eBay was flooded with fakes and forgeries. Their, eBay's, defense was simple...we don't handle it therefore we are not responsible for authenticating it.
So the global marketplace is saturated and diluted with fake and bogus Tiffany items that has enormously eroded the brand's mark of integrity and undermined the value of legitimate pieces.
Next up...all words ending in
le to be outlawed.
By the way, I just did a bulk check
There are 42,869 registered domains with
ebay in them, some with 6 extensions registered (.com .net .org .info .biz .us) so I would imagine that is a few hundred thousand.
Looks like eBay Legal is gonna be pretty damn busy.
Imagine,
If Microsoft went after everyone who had the word
soft in their domain name.
534,800 results returned with the word
soft. If all 6 extensions above were taken, that is over 3 million.
That is what I call job security for the paralegals.