Author name: fairwindsp

Steve Levy ⬥  27 October As a brand owner have you ever wondered how efficiently you’re using your precious trademark enforcement budget?  During my nearly 10-year tenure heading up the intellectual property practice for The Home Depot, this was constantly at the forefront of my mind.  Unfortunately, this may not have been the case for […]

Yvette Miller ⬥ 27 October The United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union’s Plenipotentiary Conference, which the Washington Post called “the latest battle over who should run the Internet”, continues this week and through to November 7th in Busan, South Korea. The “battle” that the publication is referring to is an issue that persists in many Internet

Sam Foster ⬥ 24 October For some newer, smaller brands, pushing out great content via social media posts – promoted or organic – allows them to address product questions quickly and publicly, as well as increase awareness and recognition, driving customers to websites to make purchases (think companies like Betabrand or Alex and Ani). For

Steve Levy ⬥  29 September I’d like to take a brief departure this week from our usual discussion of domain name disputes and talk about the important issue of social media. As many of you know, trademark infringement in the online arena is not limited to domain names, and many brand owners have been faced

Yvette Miller ⬥ 29 September This past Saturday, ICANN closed the comment period on enhancing its accountability process, a topic that will continue to be a big discussion point when the organization convenes its next public meeting in Los Angeles in mid-October. One expressed purpose of this process is to ensure that ICANN remains “accountable

Steve Levy ⬥ 22 September When reading the “Parties’ Contentions” section of this decision over the domain <areds2.com>, my mind was starting to fill up with all the potential issues: common-law trademarks, who registered first, fair use, the use of whois privacy services, and the rarity of government agencies asserting their trademarks. However, the panel

Yvette Miller ⬥ 22 September In the expanding Internet of Things, trademark owners have the task of making sure that intellectual property rights keep up with technology. At last week’s INTA conference on Internet, Innovation and ICANN: The Evolving Landscape of the Net, IP experts discussed how data is gathered through home tools (such as

Yvette Miller ⬥ 15 September Today is the last day that ICANN is accepting comments on “Implementing Rights Protection Mechanisms in the Name Collision Mitigation Framework”. The final structure of the framework will help inform trademark owners’ digital strategy decisions in the coming months as they plan to protect and promote their brand names in

Steve Levy ⬥ 25 August Ritchey Design, Inc., the complainant in this week’s UDRP decision, sells bicycle components under the RITCHEY brand and holds registrations for the RITCHEY trademark in the US, Canada, and the European Community for bicycle components. The domain name in dispute is ritchey.com, which was originally registered in 1996 but was

Yvette Miller ⬥ 25 August Twitter is in the news because it has changed its algorithm for its timelines. According to Re/code, Twitter’s algorithm now “searches for popular tweets in your ‘social graph’,” and then adds them to your timeline. In other words, if “lots of your pals have shown interest” in a tweet by

FairWinds Partners ⬥ 18 August Hope you have had a great summer and, as we move towards an active autumn, plan to join the community for these upcoming events: FairWinds’ UDRP Webinar on September 10th: Join the FairWinds Partners UDRP Team for a 20 minute webinar on UDRP trends in the new gTLD space, recent

Steve Levy ⬥ 15 August LYTRO digital camera maker in California goes after a respondent in Australia who claims he registered lytro.com.au for use in his business of manufacturing carbon fibre equipment for competitive rowing. The complainant first contacted the respondent to try and buy the domain name and there was some back-and-forth during which