Oneok, a natural gas distributor based in Oklahoma, sued Twitter last week for trademark infringement. Then dropped the case one day later.
Oneok claimed that an unidentified third party had operated an account under Oneok’s name and logo (both registered trademarks, evidently) and, more particularly, issued tweets which “had the appearance of being official statements” of the company. And therefore, gave the impression that these were authorized statements made by authorized users of Oneok’s trademarks. See Oneok’s complaint here.
The last part would have been particularly critical to Oneok’s claims of infringement because it would have argued against a defense of parody or commentary or other protected “fair use” of the trademarks.
The liability to Twitter seems to have been based upon Twitter’s non-responsiveness to Oneok’s requests to suspend or transfer the account to Oneok, rather than any primary liability. Which would be consistent with analogous “notice and takedown” obligations of publishers and hosts of blogs and websites for copyright infringement under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The case was withdrawn just one day after filing when (it seems) Twitter suspended activity on the offending account.
This major impediment to the advancement of civilization now safely ensconced behind us, we move on ….
1 Comment
Great piece but… Twitter’s stance on Trademark infringers is a hands off approach unless you go all legal and spend the money as this company had to just do to have Twitter do what Web hosts do every day. Shutdown those using other’s Trademarks and causing brand confusion.
Why is Twitter immune from the DMCA? They seem to think so! One of my company names is Trademarked and the Twitter UN for that is being used by another company in the same business. Twitter won’t do a thing. Basically they said “sue us”… Nice, huh?
Add Comment