Summit Entertainment Sues Guy Who Registered Twilight.com In 1994 For Trademark Infringement
from the are-you-freaking-serious? dept
Movie studio Summit Entertainment has become somewhat notorious for its ridiculously over aggressive attempts to "protect" what it believes is its intellectual property. Just look at the list of stories, we've written about the company. It has shut down fanzines, stopped a documentary about the real town where Twilight is supposed to take place, sued a fashion designer for accurately noting that one of its jackets was worn by "Bella" in Twilight, been involved in a legal battle with Bath & Bodyworks for selling a body lotion called "Twilight Woods," which had nothing to do with the movies, and pressed criminal charges against a fan who tweeted some photos from the movie set of the latest Twilight flick.This is a company that has a massive entitlement complex, and a somewhat faulty notion of intellectual property law.
Its latest move is to sue the guy who owns Twilight.com -- which he registered in 1994, eleven years before Stephenie Meyer published the first Twilight book and thirteen years before Summit Entertainment bought the movie rights to the book. The site, which is rather simple, does present some Amazon links to let people buy legitimate Twilight products (something you'd think Summit would like...).
The key complaint, once again, shows the technological cluelessness of Summit. The studio says that the site infringes with links to unauthorized Twilight contests and casting calls. But, as THREsq points out in the link above, Summit appears to be confusing the content found in the Google AdSense on Twilight.com with specific links put up by the site's owner, Tom Markson. One hopes that Markson can find himself a good (pro bono?) lawyer who can explain to Summit and the court that this is not how trademark law works.
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Filed Under: trademark, twilight
Companies: summit entertainment
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While the site clearly isn't the "official movie site" or anything like that, the quantcast number of 300,000 ranking would suggest something like 1000 people a day more more hitting the site. That suggests that it fails the old "moron in a hurry" test.
Basically, if the site wasn't about the movie, and wasn't trying to sell stuff from the movie, there likely wouldn't be an issue.
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Media Doesn't Get It
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Re:
From looking at what has been there over the years, there has never been any real content on the domain. Before the book/movie it had no dedicated purpose other than to host various ads or link to other sites that have real content.
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more fuckin bullshit from these MAFIAA CLOWNS !!!!
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He could easily have used the domain for almost any other purpose (how about sunrise / sunset shots from around the world). He clearly is playing off of the movie.
Do you think he would have any income if the domain was genericdomain1078272.com ?
The rest answer itself, and makes me wonder why Mike supports this stuff.
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Yep
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why not?
Hey the lawyers get paid win or lose hehe.
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Summit has heaps of money. Markson does not. Summit gets what it wants. Markson can GDIAF. I was under the impression that this is exactly how trademark law works. What have I missed?
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Wayback machine
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://twilight.com/
Have fun!
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It'd be like me making a movie titled the legend of zelda then suing nintendo for infringement, some 20 years after they used the name first.
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I need to proofread better or the spelling nazis will send me to the gas chambers.
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Now they want to sue him for shoving a few ads up on a server he has had over a decade before the book came out, to help pay off the bandwidth spike caused by Summit not being able to communicate to their customers the websites they own.
This has happened before, YouTube and UTube.
UTube predates YourTube, should Google have the right to run this other company off because people are stupid?
Once upon a time, it was just a matter of commonly mixed up websites would post a link at the top of the page saying... did you really mean to go here? And that was the end of it.
Heck Opera had an amazing time dealing with Oprah fans. The queen of media didn't try to crush them under her foot.
Summit wants the world to work exactly how they want it to, and when it doesn't they just start suing to get their way. Had Summit invested any time into acquiring these things before the nuke hit, this would have been a non issue. The domain owner has done nothing wrong, he happened to own the right name (way in advance) at the right time. He isn't offering full downloads of the movies, and most likely isn't pulling in a million dollars from his links.
Summit once again needs to go pound sand and get over themselves. They do understand there are only X books in this series to cash in on, and then there is no more. Trying to wring a few more cents out of the cash cow just gets you bad press.
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Logical... until you realize he bought the domain before morons had anything to be in a hurry about
Someone jokingly points out below he would have a case against summit for infringement, but actually truth be told, he would have a stronger case against them than they would have against him...just become you become bigger/more famous does not give you greater rights than those who came first and this guy was "first"
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With a brick. And a 3D20+100 clue-by-four.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20030603183059/http://www.twilight.com/tops20.html
http://wayb ack.archive.org/web/19980601000000*/http://twilight.com
Though recently (last 3yrs or so) seems to be exclusively about the Sparkly crappy Vampire books
I see he know has a Twilight Zone link.. My advice would be to redo the site as a twilight zone homage, or something to do with Twilight itself, you know that time between sunset and full night ;)
I can see the case that Summit might have. Seems like looking at the wayback machine you can see he states the website is not for sale unless a large sum is involved. Dunno..
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Culture of Ownership
or how about Rod Serling for creating a show called "Twilight Zone".
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Re: Culture of Ownership
I suspect you meant to type "gall", unless you think that Summit use the French to invent things ;)
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The Wayback Machine
Most of the time it went back and forth between links to PBEM games, info for organizations he got involved with like SCA, and a "coming soon" page that never delivered. It wasn't until somewhere between the April 11 and May 3, 2008, snapshots that the first links to commercial products appeared, and they were for the Twilight Zone collections on Amazon. The first Twilight link appeared a few months later, also to Amazon.
This is just the story of some guy who bought a cool domain name way back before anyone really cared about them and toyed with it for years, then decided to try to make some money from it through sponsored links. There's no infringement of any kind here.
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thanks for the giggle!
Someone forgot their basic maths class......
Shitty books with no redeeeming value * number of idiots on planet*profit per cinema ticket^2 = release more books (regardless of whether or not we have any new ideas....just steal or rehash other peoples ideas or the previous books with a few names changes!)......FOR FUCKS SAKE WE HAVE NOTHING ELSE!!!!!!!
I think thats the correct formula.
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oh btw
It pre-exists the movies but I'd LOVE summit to try finding/suing me because I'm sure I could fuck them over in the courts for a nice tidy sum
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Re: thanks for the giggle!
Her new series is about mermaids, I wonder if their scales will sparkle like diamonds on the sunlight... *giggle*
Another variable for your math formula, is the target demographic has been aging and getting other tastes. You'd think the number of "cougars" one could find at twilight screenings could prove this wrong, but there were just there to look at the hunky young men not the story.
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Trademark infringement?
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Re: Trademark infringement?
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2. The period of the evening during which this takes place, between daylight and darkness.
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AdSense
It is the AdSense and Adwords engines run by Google that place 'twilight' ads on the site. The engines are run by relevance algorithms.
If they really want to sue the right person, they need to sue the person running the twilight ads on AdWords as they are the ones linking to twilight-related content.
Surely it should be easy to get this cased tossed out, right?
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hmm
I guess he is indeed guilty of providing free marketing services for Summit Entertainment.
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monster
I seem to remember sending an email a while back challenging monster to sue them (I used the phrase "you'll be torn into teeny tiny unshielded pieces).
I got a reply from their lawyers saying they had no plans to challenge Disney (precisely because Disney would utterly obliterate Monster Cable from existence if they even tried)
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I think he's doing a bit more with his editorializing than saying "that's weird." Don't you?
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He does not have a stronger case against Summit than Summit has against him.
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Re: why not?
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Re: The Wayback Machine
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Re: AdSense
The first link I see is "Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer," which links to an Amazon page for the books.
Also, I think this is a case where he could be held responsible for the Twilight ads that Google serves for his site.
It will not be easy to get this case tossed. I actually think this case could win.
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What?
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Re: monster
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Major Obvious
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its gonna happen to me
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the site is back up
Twilight twilight twilight...
bad literature ruining lives.....
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