The domain name Quirk.com just got his with a UDRP.
The domain name is registered to TobyClements.com, LLC however according to the company they don’t own the domain name but changed the ownership to market the domain name.
The domain is still owned by Exotic Design Group which seems to have owned the domain since at least 2005.
There are at least 5 trademark registrations for the generic dictionary word Quirk in the USPTO.
The complaint was filed by the owner of Quirkbooks.com, Book Soup Publishing located Philadelphia.
The domain seems to be a developed site rather than a parked page.
This may wind up being a cautionary tale for those that may transfer ownership of the domain, while still maintaining control.
Rick Schwartz 101 – Get 3 Panelists and ask for RDNH.
And for me these cases just make the stuff that cannot be taken away worth that much more – that is the big lesson I remember when dealing with a potential buyer’s legal representative or broker.
Stay real hard 🙂
Maybe somebody should tell Quickbooks
I’m with JP on this one. Let Quickbooks / Intuit go after the Philadelphia company for using a confusingly-similar name. Who cares whether finance software and children’s books aren’t related. Books and video sharing (video is what Quirk.com appears to be) don’t have anything in common, either. Nobody in their right mind would confuse them with some publishing company.
Just my own cursory snoop around the USPTO site revealed the aforementioned Quirk trademark was assigned only a year and a half ago to the Philly publishing company that prints “fiction and non-fiction books for adults and children”. The Quirk.com website is a video sharing site. Not likely there would be confusion here.
The claimants filed, with their their 2010 trademark filing, that the first commercial use of the Quirk name, by them, was in 2001, and that may likely be the case. But why didn’t they get Quirk in 2001? That appears to be when they registered quirkbooks.com, so what’s the deal here? I should qualify myself by saying I didn’t run a whois history search on quirkbooks.com; I just checked the basic whois, though there is an archive of QuirkBooks.com dating to 2002 on the Wayback Machine.
Another Quirk is assigned to a car company of some type, from 1977. No confusion with video there.
I could go on, but I really, really, really hope we get to make a poster out of this small-time publisher.
Buttheads (I’m being really nice).