bein fined for website name

MothballsWallet

Naf wrote: »

They can't have a monopoly on either of those words being used, nor on Silent Night (or are they gonna sue the lot of us next week).
I don't think they will get far, as their trademark is the two words strung together as Silentnight. Yes, you did this: but in a website address you can't have any spaces. It's very clear your website was not set as competition, nor was it bad mouthing them. I think they'd need to show your use of the two words was intended to refer to them or their product in some way; and I don't think they could.
But I'm not a lawyer.

Spaces, no, but you could have hyphens / dashes, for-example.co.uk.

Personally speaking, I have my own web domain that doesn't have spaces or dashes in the name.

Naf

MothballsWallet wrote: »

Spaces, no, but you could have hyphens / dashes, for-example.co.uk.

Indeed, I know.
My main point is that just because its string together in a web address doesn't mean it's supposed to be. Www.therapist.com comes to mind, although granted that's an example of the opposite: but still serves to highlight the point.

ILW

I would suspect this is a fishing trip by a law firm. They probably send out thousands of similar letters per day.

Are they asking for the payment to be made to Silent Night or themelves?

ABERDEEN_2

ILW wrote: »

I would suspect this is a fishing trip by a law firm. They probably send out thousands of similar letters per day.

Are they asking for the payment to be made to Silent Night or themelves?

They want £500 cheque made out to silent night

ABERDEEN_2

krisdorey wrote: »

If you are going to takedown the website then you should takedown the Facebook page as well, although as others say I think they would have a very hard time suing you.

That's the facebook down

patman99

Just register a new domain with a '-' inbetween the 'silent' & 'night' then transfer your current site to it.
Do the same with Facebook as well.
With the hyphen in place, their claim collapses.

Owain_Moneysaver

If the letter is from Groom Wilkes & Wright LLP it's probably genuine in as much as that is the service address for trademarks owned by Silentnight Group Limited. In September they applied to register the trademark Silentnight for a wide variety of classes. You can search at the IPO site for the trademark words, and you can check the class of goods that you can supply. "Leather and imitations of leather; animal skins, hides; trunks and travelling bags; handbags, rucksacks, purses; umbrellas, parasols and walking sticks; whips, harness and saddlery" are all Class 18 for example, which is not (as far as I can see) registered under Silentnight to any trade mark owner.

HappyMJ

ABERDEEN wrote: »

That's the facebook down

They scaring you off pretty easily...I wouldn't back down quite so easily. but...anyway....it's your business. I would have gone tabloids got some free publicity then changed the name to the company formerly known as not so silent night getting the google searches to your site doing that for a year then shut it down.

prowla

I think that the company silentnight cannot sue everybody who uses the words silent and night - I mean there would be a heck of a lot of carol singers in trouble!

It would seem pretty obvious that your site was not referring to their brand of product at all.

They might have construed it to be some sort of protest against them or action group, initially, but if they looked then they would find out that was not the case.

(I always liked the fridge company called "Sell Fridges"!)

prowla

Change it to no so silent tonight...