Biz Journal giant sues over cybersquatting

Advance Publications is a private media company that owns Golf Digest as well as more than forty local business journals and they run the www.bizjournals.com website which I think is a terrific snapshot of local business conditions nationwide.

They filed a cybersquatting, trademark infringement suit in federal district court in Texas against Dauben Inc among other defendants.  They are claiming that the defendant company has purchased several domains such as: phoenixbizjournals.com (Advance Publications’s URL is phoenix.buzjournals.com) and golfdisges.com among others.  To make matters worse, the defendant advertises competing local business journals and services.  I’m sure I’ve accidentally entered the alleged cybersquatter myself!

This complaint is another example of useful competitive intelligence and suggests that trademark infringement complaints are useful for finding out about a company’s structure, the way the various subsidiaries are related and what aspects of a company’s intellectual property is worth protecting.  Here, Advance Publications obviously highly prizes the traffic it gets from its websites and is no doubt fairly successful at monetizing it.  The complaint identifies the company as private, meaning it doesn’t sell public stock and in the complaint it brags that Forbes called it the 41st largest private company in the U.S.  That’s no small achievement for a media company that mostly operates under the radar.   But if they want to sue an interloper, they are forced to give up some privacy.

Complaint courtesy Courthousenews

Tags: Advance Publications, American City Business Journals, competitive intelligence, Golf Digest, Linkedin, trademark infringement