[ceegee]

folgendes habe ich gelesen (neu?):

An unfortunate thing happened today when MCO founder Mark Ferguson had to make public his long running problems with MINIUSA/BMW of North America. Here's a portion of his post on MCO:

"I received a letter from the trademark litigation counsel of BMW AG and BMW North America asking that I cease and desist using our original logo as well as transfer the domain, minicooperonline.com, to BMW as it was viewed by their counsel to violate BMW’s trademarks. In an attempt to continue development of a strong information transfer relationship with the MINI organization, I agreed to put together a transition plan proposal for the logo, domain name, and provide a means to further emphasize that the site was a community independent of MINI/BMW. ...At the time, it was conveyed to me that the issue with the domain name was that the term “mini cooper” is a trademarked term.

[after several name changes were denied by BMW legal]...

Around the second week of July my counsel submitted a letter in which we said that the name that we would be moving to was MINIApex.com. During the third week of July we received another letter from BMW’s counsel that indicated that this would not be acceptable either. Based on this response my counsel called BMW’s counsel in an attempt to better understand why this was not acceptable and learned the following:

BMW will be taking a hard line on any domain name that uses MINI as part of the name when it is relative to the automobile. Any sites that are commercial (offering products and/or servvices for the MINI) will not be allowed to use MINI in their domain name. Furthermore any non-commerical site (e.g. – a club site or fan site) with MINI in its domain name will be subject to this same standard if it provides hyperlinks to any commercial site selling MINI-related products and or services."

This of course is just a small portion of Mark's original post but it should give you an idea of the problem that MCO and indeed the rest of the MINI web may be facing. You can check out the entire post here.

Mark is not only a great asset to the MINI community but also a good friend who has put an enormous amount into his website. MCO went from being an unknown newcomer of the MINI web world to one of the absolutely best forums based MINI sites out there in less than a year due to his efforts.

....ob das auch auf unsere site zutrifft?