Advertise.com Scores First Victory in Lawsuit with AOL
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Judge forces AOL to change venue.
Advertise.com 1, AOL 0.
Online advertising company Advertise.com has scored its first victory in its legal battles with AOL: a judge has ruled against AOL’s favored jurisdiction of the Eastern District Court of Virginia. AOL was forced to refile the case in California Central District Court, where Advertise.com is based.
Both companies sued each other back in August, after AOL blamed Advertise.com of trademark infringement of AOL’s Advertising.com brand. AOL is also claiming trademark rights to Ad.com, which derailed the $1.4M sale of that domain name.
Advertise.com released the following statement today:
In a lawsuit filed in August 2009, corporate giant America Online continues the dirty tactics long associated with big business by suing Advertise.com for its use of the generic word “advertise” in its designation and domain names.
Termed a battle between David & Goliath by the court itself, AOL seeks to monopolize the online advertising market and unfairly restrain its competitors by asserting extremely broad rights to words commonly used in our daily vernacular. AOL’s lawsuit is an attempt to unjustly overtake the entire online marketing space and if unopposed could likely lead to attacks on other competitors in the Internet advertising world.
Advertise.com won its first battle against latter-day Goliath on October 9, 2009, when it prevailed in a motion to dismiss based on venue in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. AOL purposely chose to bring the suit in Virginia, well-known for its exceedingly fast docket, even though the disputed action took place in California and AOL’s own headquarters are located in New York.
AOL failed when the court ruled in favor of Advertise.com and granted a transfer of venue. This was AOL’s underhanded and calculated scare tactic to keep Advertise.com off balance with mountains of paperwork and multiple legal threats in hopes it would give in to AOL’s unfounded demands.
Further Reading:
- Go Daddy Scores Victory to Benefit Domain Registrars and Internet Companies
- AOL Sues Advertise.com for Trademark Infringement
- VeriSign Scores a Win in Antitrust Lawsuit
Tags: ad.com, advertise.com, advertising.com, AOL
What happens when AOL loses, will Divyank Turakhia complete his purchase agreement and buy the domain name?
Good first win for Advertise.com. I honestly cannot imagine anyone being on AOL’s side in this.
Advertise.com Scores First Victory in Lawsuit with AOL – http://tinyurl.com/yfomrm9
Who is representing Advertise.com?
[...] [...]
[...] There’s an important lesson here for companies that use a generic domain name: it doesn’t give you rights to all variations of your name. That’s why it’s important to pick up your name in other top level domain names (and variants in .com) if you want to keep the competition from getting them. If only AOL’s Advertising.com understood that. [...]