Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> IPKat

Intellectual Property Law

: IPKat

Why teacakes that suck might hurt marketing consultancies

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

This link from Ars Technica, via the IPKat's friend Kristof Neefs (Altius), has sparked off an interesting issue. Says the IPKat, if the name of my marketing consultancy is, say, Kudos Consultancy, and someone else uses the word Kudos in a completely different field, let's say teacakes, on the assumption that neither of us is particularly well-known, neither of us can stop the other using the word Kudos. So far, so good. But what happens if the maker of teacakes gets a bad reputation among consumers, which spawns a rash of 'Kudos sucks' sites on the internet? After a while, anyone looking for my consultancy on a search engine and innocently keying in the search term 'kudos' will be deluged with kudos-sucks web links. This in turn may cause searchers to give up looking for entirely, or to view my excellent services in a somewhat suspicious manner, given that they have begun to associate them with the word 'sucks'.

The IPKat asks: what practical and legal advice would you give the IPKat in this situation?

Teacake recipes here and here

Full post as published by IPKat on February 14, 2009 (boomark / email).