Originally posted by Sportacle
1. A term doesn't have to be identical to infrige on a trademark.
"Confusingly Similar" is enough. That would be the argument.
2. A friend received a letter from an entertainment company a few weeks ago. The first paragraph insisted that the mark had been diluted by redirecting the site to a pay per click site and the company wanted $5,000 in damages immediately, which would be the alternative to avoid litigation. So handing over the domain and calling it even was not an alternative - nor was the UDRP.
3. The cost to larger firms to sue you is actually based on economies of scale. They already have full time counsel on staff that they pay via a salary. So legal costs to a firm like Microsoft is really just asking their Intellectual Property Specialists to work on your case versus another project. The cost to the company is minimal.
4. Many people think you just go to the trademark office and "get a trademark". No. It is not as easy as this. Your application would be published for opposition. The more unique that a mark is and the more classes of goods and services that it covers makes it very difficult to acquire a similar trademark. You would probably face opposition from Microsoft regardless if you were selling the letter "O" or identical software. For instance, the recent case where the makers of SPAM (the canned ham) is opposing the mark application of a company who attempts to stop SPAM (junk email) Although the stop spam comapny is called SpamArrest (or something like that). Again, this is an incremental cost for you to fight the opposition and a smaller cost to large firms who are just trying to find extra work for their staff counsel.
k:
