Someone has nicked our company name and logo!!!

Horace

When I set up my most recent business, I was speaking to an accountant friend of mine who told me that someone could come along and adapt my company name - e.g. Horace Leisure Ltd to Horace Leisure (Birmingham) Ltd and there wouldnt be anything that I could do about it.

If you have a logo then perhaps you should have trade marked it and that would have given you some protection.

You could say they were passing off and maybe if you are a member of the FSB you could contact their legal helpline, or failing that seek legal assistance from elsewhere.

pitkin2020

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

If you stick their domain in the whois section http://www.nominet.org.uk/ it'll tell you who owns the site if they weren't clever enough to hide their details.

Don't you mean if they weren't stupid enough, its a legal requirement for a business website to display an address and it has to be displayed by a whois search. If its not displayed when you do a whois search via nominet then report them to nominet who will force the address to be shown in 7 days.

scheming_gypsy

ah, i didn't realise you had to have a business address to be visible.

patman99

A huge number of etailers do not have an address on their website.

Use the power of the internet to keep people coming to your site instead of his.

madpiano

contact their webhost and complain. Include the email to the website owner to show that you tried to resolve directly. Usually they get shut down by the host. It happens a lot actually.

Scuba_Steve

1) It does not matter if you have no copyright on your logos if you can prove that the person in question is using a name that looks and sounds like yours along with a colour scheme to obtain customers off the back of your hard work and reputation then this is passing of which is agaisnt the law.

Passing off is a common law tort which can be used to enforce unregistered trademark rights. The tort of passing off protects the goodwill of a trader from a misrepresentation that causes damage to goodwill. The law of passing off prevents one person from misrepresenting his or her goods or services as being the goods and services of the claimant, and also prevents one person from holding out his or her goods or services as having some association or connection with the plaintiff when this is not true.


Sometimes this is difficult to prove but it wont cost much for a solicitors letter and may be all you need to force them to stop


Don't let a person piggy back of your hard work and even ruin your reputation It take many years to build a solid reputation ann a couple of minutes for someone to ruin it good luck!:beer: