Information sites about products and making profit from advertisements not allowed?
Hey guys,
I have a website which was originally created as an information site about a very popular product. It's about a particular clothing item and I give all kinds of information about it, from how you best wash it to how you can make one yourself.
The keyword I am targetting is the name of one of the companies in this area which sells this item. But at the same time this word is used all the time when people talk about the product in blogs, forums etc no matter where they bought it (meaning, there's a lot of companies selling the same item but they have their own suppliers) so it shouldn't be weird that I use it on my website aswell from my point of view.
Some months ago I was contacted by a company who said that I wasn't allowed to do what I did because they had design registrated this product (not sure if it's called that, but basically it means they claim the product in Europe to make sure only they can sell their "invention", which acutally is not new but they got it registrated).
The problem they mainly pointed out on my website was that I were advertising for one of their rivals on the market and they also mentioned in the letter that they had been in contact with their rival and basically said that they were trespassing their trademark/design registration or something like that.
As this was my first site and I had not much knowledge about what was right and what was wrong in this case I decided to remove all advertisements for some time until I had this figured out.
But when thinking about all this it really makes me confused. To me that sounds weird. There's like tons of sites reviewing products about this and that. Would this mean Apple could sue everyone who makes information sites about their products and make profit from it with advertisements?
I have a website which was originally created as an information site about a very popular product. It's about a particular clothing item and I give all kinds of information about it, from how you best wash it to how you can make one yourself.
The keyword I am targetting is the name of one of the companies in this area which sells this item. But at the same time this word is used all the time when people talk about the product in blogs, forums etc no matter where they bought it (meaning, there's a lot of companies selling the same item but they have their own suppliers) so it shouldn't be weird that I use it on my website aswell from my point of view.
Some months ago I was contacted by a company who said that I wasn't allowed to do what I did because they had design registrated this product (not sure if it's called that, but basically it means they claim the product in Europe to make sure only they can sell their "invention", which acutally is not new but they got it registrated).
The problem they mainly pointed out on my website was that I were advertising for one of their rivals on the market and they also mentioned in the letter that they had been in contact with their rival and basically said that they were trespassing their trademark/design registration or something like that.
As this was my first site and I had not much knowledge about what was right and what was wrong in this case I decided to remove all advertisements for some time until I had this figured out.
But when thinking about all this it really makes me confused. To me that sounds weird. There's like tons of sites reviewing products about this and that. Would this mean Apple could sue everyone who makes information sites about their products and make profit from it with advertisements?
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KirkMcD -
Thanks
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