Trademark Question

Alright so i recently received a C&D letter for on of my domains, this domain has been making me 50/day+. I plan on getting a new domain and ranking again but first i have a few questions just to make sure i am safe!

1) lets say the trade mark is World of Warcraft or Call of Duty, if i buy wowhacks.com or codhacks.com is that a trademark infrigment? I mean wow and cod could be anything? What do you guys think?

2)If i disable my website and send them the domain , can i keep my content and put it on the other website or will i be penalized by google?

Thanks in advanced!

I'm not a lawyer but have dealt with C&D for trademark. I would assume WOW and COD on a site about WOW or COD would be viewed as a violation. You just need to come up with something mmorphacks.com or fpshacks.com and not worry about getting shut down again. You will make a whole lot more in the long run. As for reusing the content, I say go for it. It has already been indexed to your original site so it gets the credit but if the content is good take it for your visitors. Unless it has been scrapped and plastered everywhere then I so don't use. Launch your new site with original content and then drip the old dupe content in slowly. Try breaking it into pieces and adding new content to it. My .02

Thanks yeah your right i think im gonna play it safe and not include any aspect of the trademark in my domain name.

Do you think if i use some type of game aspect as the domain name. Like lets say instead of callofdutyhacks i use perkhacks.com or prestigehacks.com ? those are examples btw so you get the idea of what im trying to say.

Yeah I think those are safe terms since they are more than likely not trademarked. I would just stay away from COD, Modern Warfare, CallofDuty, Activision, Treyarch, and anything else you might think they might have trademarked. Also be careful of any copyrighted material if you site gets popular. Starting over sucks so the less you have to do it the better.

Wow is trademarked by blizzard, I'm not sure about Cod. This is why wow gold sellers starting using the term "world gold" instead of "wow gold" -- blizz was making those advertising with "wow gold" on their adwords to have their campaign stopped because of their "wow" (world of warcraft) trademark. Not much you can do with a domain that has "wow" in it, when it clearly relates to "world of warcraft". You could make it mean something else, but I think you're past that point.

There is "confusingly similar" when dealing with trademarks, where you can make it look close to the trademark, but is still different by X %, which can be enough to not let a C&D mean anything.

If I were you I would keep the site running until they take the domain through a dispute. You will still be making money until then, vs. making nothing. You cannot reuse the site's content unless the content was on pages hidden from google ever crawling it.

Thanks for the good info im starting to get a cleaer understanding, but im also having another doubt. If i use lets says pictures of characters from World of Warcraft or pictures of the Map are those pics consider trademarked? I wont use the logo or the brand name at all just pictures of the characters? Anyone know anything about that?

Do not use the logo, as there are image trademarks along with text trademarks.

If you want to use artwork, this is where "confusingly similar" can come into play. Edit the images enough to be DIFFERENT, but confusing enough to look like a wow character.

You may avoid a trademark dispute by removing trademarks from the site, but if you use their copyrighted artwork you may get a DMCA instead

loboxd said:

Thanks for the good info im starting to get a cleaer understanding, but im also having another doubt. If i use lets says pictures of characters from World of Warcraft or pictures of the Map are those pics consider trademarked? I wont use the logo or the brand name at all just pictures of the characters? Anyone know anything about that?

Click to expand...

Philippines said:

Do not use the logo, as there are image trademarks along with text trademarks.

If you want to use artwork, this is where "confusingly similar" can come into play. Edit the images enough to be DIFFERENT, but confusing enough to look like a wow character.

You may avoid a trademark dispute by removing trademarks from the site, but if you use their copyrighted artwork you may get a DMCA instead

Click to expand...

do you work for Alan？。。。