Court Once Again Dismisses A Bev Stayart Lawsuit

from the use-in-commerce dept

Wed, Oct 6th 2010 4:07pm — Mike Masnick

We've covered, a few times now, the weak attempts of one Bev Stayart to sue Yahoo and Google because searches on her included random links to sites selling drugs like Levitra, Viagra and Cialis. After we first wrote about this, Stayart also threatened to sue us over comments made on this site. We responded and never heard back. Since then, she has continued her quixotic quest to sue search engines over the link between her name and Levitra, Viagra and Cialis -- apparently still not recognizing that the more she sues, the more legitimate the connection becomes, as the lawsuit and reports about the lawsuit spread online.

Her initial lawsuit was against Yahoo, which the court quickly dismissed. Not getting the message that this claim was a non-starter, she sued again. Eric Goldman, who has been tracking this story from the beginning, lets us know that the appeals court has upheld the lower court ruling tossing out the lawsuit. They point out that her claims of having a trademark on her name that was violated don't hold much water, in large part because trademark covers commercial use, and her name wasn't being used commercially. Her argument, that her charitable work means that her name is used in commerce, didn't fly with the court:

"While Stayart's goals may be passionate and well-intentioned, they are not commercial. And the good name that a person garners in such altruistic feats is not what § 43 of the Lanham Act protects."

As Goldman notes, one would hope this is the end of her lawsuits, but she's shown no sign of giving up yet. I'll repeat Goldman's "unsolicited advice" from a few months ago:

Some unsolicited advice for Bev Stayart: stop suing search engines, and stop running vanity searches on the search engines. Life is too short to fret about sploggers!

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Filed Under: bev stayart, trademark
Companies: yahoo

10 Comments

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 6 Oct 2010 @ 4:45pm

You Can’t Trademark Your Own Name
Commercial use or not.
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MrWilson, 6 Oct 2010 @ 4:58pm

A quick google search for the keywords, "Stayart viagra" pulls up the first Techdirt article with this article as an additional reference.

The next result is a tech.blorge.com article entitled, "Bev Stayart cannot give you an erection."

How deep will it get before she realizes she's dug herself in too far and every client who googles her will, instead of dismissing references to the drugs as coincidence as they likely did before her lawsuit, get an eyeful of articles about how litigious she can be over meaningless search results. It's probably too late.
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IronM@sk, 6 Oct 2010 @ 5:06pm

Googled for teh lulz
Bev Stayart cannot give you an erection - TECH.BLORGE.com

It's funny cos it's true.
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Anonymous Coward, 6 Oct 2010 @ 5:46pm

The name Bev Stayart reminds me of beavers and is not because they build dams.
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RD, 6 Oct 2010 @ 6:06pm

Bev Stayart - Erection Killer
"Bev Stayart cannot give you an erection - TECH.BLORGE.com"

Well, speaking for myself, I can truthfully say Bev Stayart DOES NOT give me an erection.
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 6 Oct 2010 @ 6:11pm

SEO
I for one, would never associate BEV STAYART with PORN or SKANK or VIAGARA, and neither should a web-crawling robot.

SEO = Streisand Effect Optimization
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Anonymous Coward, 6 Oct 2010 @ 10:41pm

Re: SEO
Nor should any web-crawling robot equate BEV STAYART with LITIGIOUS LOONEY or LEVITRA.
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viagra, 7 Oct 2010 @ 6:05am

This women is clearly mad, an so is the American I can sue anybody attitude. Thankfully her claims were thrown out.

Plus just to add insult to injury Ive add a Viagra Link lmao.
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David, 7 Oct 2010 @ 10:43am

Google search
I notice, however, that Google suppresses ads when you search a term like [Bev Stayart].
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t-bomb, 7 Oct 2010 @ 6:20pm

Here's a lawyer's take on this:

http://gillette-torvik.blogspot.com/2010/10/bev-beverly-stayart-american-originals.html
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