Trademark Infringement

[Beadoire]

Hi well this morning I woke up to this email:

I am writing to you with respect to the protection of our registered trademark name, business reputation and trading activities.
We have been trading under the name ‘beadoir’ for some years and the name is a registered trade mark with the Intellectual Property Office (registration number 2546541). We have subsequently established substantial goodwill and reputation under this name, particularly in respect to the provision of jewellery making as well as workshops and parties.
It has come to our attention that you are trading under the name ‘beadoire’ and the domain name 'www.beadoire.co.uk'. Subsequently, we are concerned that there is a real risk that members of the public and members of the trade will confuse or associate your trading activities with those offered by us.
In addition, UK Trademark Law stipulates that infringement of a trade mark takes place when:
• someone uses a name identical or similar to your registered trade mark for identical or similar 
   goods or services; and
• the public are likely to confuse the two marks.
We are therefore writing to you at this stage to give you the opportunity to cease the use of the trading name ‘beadoire’, the domain name 'www.beadoire.co.uk' and to remove any reference to ‘beadoire’ from your website. We understand how much is involved in this and are therefore willing to allow you until 30th April 2011 to do this. Please note that if you fail to cease the use of this name, we will have no alternative but to seek legal action.
We appreciate your co-operation over this matter..
Yours sincerely,
Beadoir Jewellery
www.beadoir.co.uk



I first registered my domain name in August 2008,
They first registered theirs in June 2010.
They registered their trademark in April 2010.

When I registered my domain name this company did not exist.

I don't know what to do now, am I protected by copyright law or anything else?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[JhnStcks]

This only my personal opinion and by no way is what you should do.

Looking through their website i can't find an address, any delivery charges, T&Cs, anything about refunds and returns all these are breaking current distance selling regulations and sales of goods act.  (am I being blind?)

If they haven't got the legalities of their own business sorted I can't see them attempting to have your business closed down.

I don't know anything about copyright law but i think they are trying it on and I would ignore the emails. 

If you get any other emails from them you could always report them to trading standards.

[FionaJMD]

Again, I dont know anything legal about this - Trading Standards or Citizens advice may be a good place to start or online "registered trademarks etc"

However, following on from what JhnStcks says - you could put a disclaimer on your website along the lines of "we are in no way, shape or form associated with the company called Beadoir"

I would think that in order to register a trademark, there should have been some searches done beforehand to see if this name was already being used.

[DeputyDog]

Ownership of a Domain Name, or registration of a Company Name, does not provide any registered trade mark protection regardless of how many years you have owned the domain name.
In law they are all completely separate. For registered trade mark protection your brand must be registered as a trade mark.

If traders decide not to register their trade mark, they place the mark and consequently their business in a very vulnerable position. They will then need to rely on common law (passing off) to protect their rights. Providing evidence of this for a court of law will take up a substantial amount of time. With possible appeals the whole process could take years with the eventual outcome always in doubt.
Unless a business decides to register their trade mark, third parties are legally entitled to register the same mark and could then offer to license or sell it back to the business for a fee. If the business simply carries on trading, it could be sued for infringing a registered right.

The above quotes taken from www.ipo.gov.uk  , i would seek legal advice or speak to citizens advice .

 

[Baa]

I add to the call to get advice ASAP, this is a registered trademark.

http://84.12.207.146/types/tm/t-os/t-tmj/journals/6840/domestic/2546541.html

[scotserve]

Ok this is a Nominet domain name and Nominet work on the Basis of FCFS - first come first served - they will not entertain a DRS on a trademark registered after the domain was in place and certainly not 2 years, else you would be in the situation where people would be registering trademarks to hijack domains.
Passing off is more difficult but it is them passing off as you - so in effect you should be suing them
However your domain is improperly registered and I suggest you get that sorted immediately ( Mind you so is theirs )

Incidentaly I have been a Nominet member/registrar since 1998 and thats what i am basing the above on.

[scotserve]

Looking through their website i can't find an address, any delivery charges, T&Cs, anything about refunds and returns all these are breaking current distance selling regulations and sales of goods act.  (am I being blind?)
If they haven't got the legalities of their own business sorted I can't see them attempting to have your business closed down.

Lots of stuff missing and illegal DSR's on the OP's site as well

[DGTG Wholesale]

I don't know about any others but we have received a few emails like this in the past from "chancers". The funniest was one that claimed we stole their logo, keywords etc. Which I knew we didn't do because we only put our own which is usually two or three words or the brands descriptions on the site, and I made the logo for our site myself so I knew we didn't steal that, so I checked these guys out only to find they had been registered only a few weeks before. So that got kicked into touch quickly.

However I did have once a situation where a competitor came onto a site of ours stole keywords, descriptions, images that still had our watermark on them, and worse of all size guides that we had made to make clearer the difference between US and british sizes. Obviously because I could prove beyond doubt what he had done I was able to have their site taken down, after a week or so of talking with the host company. Normally if someone steals the odd image, it doesn't bother me, but the person in question if I didn't act would have caused serious damage to us if it had been allowed to continue. Basically what I think they thought was I am too lazy to do any work myself and just copy someone else and then blame them if something goes wrong. For months after I was still getting calls from their customers "F"ing and blinding over why they hadn't got their goods. Which shows that not only was they prepared to steal hard work from others but they were prepared to shaft their own customers.

Internet business is about hard work and making your business stand out and being reliable, unfortunately it is too common these days to have people try to shaft you at every turn because they think they can get away with it, because there isn't a police station at the end of each search page.

[Andy c]

any update on situation or :(