Virginia IP Law : Virginia Intellectual Property Lawyer & Attorney : Troutman Sanders Law Firm : Technology & Patent Litigation

Recent decisions in IP cases in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia have not been groundbreaking, but they are good reminders of some of the nuts and bolts of IP litigation. This post covers two opinions regarding whether the Court is an appropriate forum.

In Proprietors of Strata Plan No. 36 v. Coral Gardens Resort Mgmt., Ltd., et als., case no. 1:09-cv-550, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 97704 (E.D. Va. Oct. 16, 2009), District Judge Anthony J. Trenga vacated a default judgment and dismissed a trademark infringement suit for lack of personal jurisdiction. Plaintiff Strata is a Turks and Caicos corporation with its principal place of business in Turks and Caicos.

To demonstrate jurisdiction, Strata alleged that the defendants (1) registered the domain name "coralgardens.com" with Network Solutions, located in Herndon, Virginia, in 1998; (2) “advertise on the coralgardens.com website, which provides a toll-free number to call from the United States and Canada ‘inviting and accepting business from the United States, including the Commonwealth of Virginia’”; (3) “have contracted to sell units at Coral Gardens in Virginia, have contracted to lease units at Coral Gardens in Virginia and have, this year, offered to contract with a Virginia resident, Mike Revell, to lease his unit at Coral Gardens”; (4) “met with Virginia residents Mike Revell and his wife in Prince William County, Virginia and agreed to sell units at Coral Gardens and lease units at Coral Gardens while in Virginia”; and (5) sent Virginia resident Mike Revell an email from an email address with the coralgardens.com domain name, soliciting rental business.

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By now you’d have to be living under a rock not to have some familiarity with the challenges that the Internet, with its typically-free, open-to-anyone culture, can pose to services and information that have traditionally been provided for payment or on a restricted access basis. Law generally – and IP litigation in particular – is no exception.

Recently, two new free, Internet-based services – Trademarkia and RECAP – have emerged that target subjects of interest to IP litigators.

Trademarkia.com offers free trademark searches online, billing itself as “the largest, most accurate, and most complete free search engine for U.S. federally registered trademarks on the Internet” and explaining that it “provide[s] up to the minute contextual information about the current use of interesting business names, slogans, and logos through pictures, commercials, and conversations from Flickr, Google, Youtube, and Twitter for each U.S. trademark filed in with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since the year 1870.”

Trademarkia.com aims to make money from both the usual advertising sources and from providing services related to filing trademarks. It also lists IP lawyers, together with the trademarks with which they’re associated (see an example for my blog colleague Rob Brooke here) and has an “Ask a Trademark Expert” section that it explains “is a collaborative community where individuals are able to exchange ideas and opinions on legal or business-related questions.”

For those in the legal profession, Trademarkia.com may be fun and is certainly useful as a quick reference tool. The site does not appear to provide detailed information about what Trademarkia.com searches, how the company’s information is updated (akin to the source information that Lexis and Westlaw provide on their databases), and how it compares to established trademark search services, however. In the absence of such information, it is difficult to imagine careful practitioners relying on Trademarkia.com for more than recreational or quick reference use. And any careful practitioner also ought to check out Trademarkia.com’s Terms and Conditions and Disclaimer page, to which one supposedly agrees by using the site.

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