Trademark Lawsuit Claiming Organic Search Results Create Initial Interest Confusion Falls Apart–Larsen v. Larson
19 12 2017Disclosure note: I provided an expert report in this now-dismissed case, so you might consider my comments to be advocacy. I’ll explain my expert role in a bit.
The Court Opinion
Susan Larsen practices business law in the Denver, Colorado metro area under the name Larsen Law Offices. She claims she’s been using the name since 2003, though she did not register the name as a trademark (and would need to address the obvious secondary meaning issues to do so). David Larson practices estate planning law (and more) in the Denver metro area as well. In 2013, Larson set up a website at the domain name davidlarsonlawoffice.com, and he used the domain name larsonlawoffice.com starting in 2016. In 2016, Larsen sued Larson for trademark infringement, ACPA and more. After the complaint, Larson’s website removed references to Larson Law Offices, adopting the name David M. Larson, PLLC. Larson partially moved to dismiss.
Cybersquatting. The court says “Plaintiff does not allege that Mr. Larson had actual knowledge of Larsen Law Offices’ existence in 2013, or that he has ever conducted a Google search that returned plaintiff’s name.” Further (cites omitted):
Case citation: Larsen Law Offices v. David Larson, 2017 WL 1131885 (D. Colo. Mar. 14, 2017). The complaint.
The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2017/03/trademark-lawsuit-claiming-organic-search-results-create-initial-interest-confusion-falls-apart-larsen-v-larson.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.
