An Unlikely Attempt to Trademark SEO
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If you've never heard of Jason Gambert before, pay attention, because you're likely to hear more about him in the future. This person came out of nowhere and tried to trademark the term “SEO” in the United States – and he's on his way to winning. Fortunately, there are members of the SEO community trying to stop him, or at least slow him down.
I admit to being a latecomer to this story. I didn't hear about it until late May 2008. It seems to have hit the general radar of the SEO community in early April, thanks to Sarah Bird. This intrepid young lawyer was working on trademarks for SEOmoz, when she discovered that someone was trying to register “SEO” as a service mark.
“I was shocked,” she wrote in a blog entry on SEOmoz. She discovered that he'd passed the preliminary review by the Trademark Office's reviewing attorney, and made it to the publication stage. This put the registration “in a sort of waiting period during which people who would be harmed by the registration can file an objection with the Trademark Office,” Bird explained.
We've passed the filing deadline for that, but Bird and several others did in fact file Notices of Opposition to Gambert's attempt to trademark the term. Gambert missed a May 19th deadline to file responses to their notices. In response to this lack of response, on May 27 (right after Memorial Day), Bird filed a Motion for Default Judgment – basically a request to be granted a victory because the other party failed to respond.
At this point, Gambert got his act together – sort of. He filed a 41-page response to the Notices of Opposition on the same day that Bird filed her Motion for Default Judgment. Bird takes many of his arguments apart in a blog post she makes on the subject. By the time this article is published, she may have responded to each and every one of the points he makes (or tries to make) in a more official manner, in a legal document to be filed with the Trademark Office.
Or not. I am definitely not a trademark or any other kind of lawyer, so for all I know that may not be necessary, since Gambert did not actually miss his deadline. In any case, though, this is where we stand right now. How did we get to such a state?
Next: A Trademark Timeline >>
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