Week 10 Poll Analysis

During the 10th week, we have created a poll, with the question : At the federal level, service mark infringement is governed by....? . There are a total of 6 votes this week. 4 voters voted for the answer 'LANHAM Trademark Act of 1946' and the remaining 2 voters voted for the answer 'Intellectual Property Statues'. The correct answer for this week's poll is the first answer, which is the 'LANHAM Trademark Act of 1946'.

Below shows the pie chart of the poll's results.

Below shows a screenshot of how the actual poll looks like.

Harassment

Nowadays in the internet there are more and more people have forgotten about the existence of Legal Issues. Actually this doesn't happen only in the internet but in the real world. People have getting more and more selfish and try to find all kinds of method to pursue the target without thinking about the method that they use is it legal or not. This makes people who takes in charge of these issues getting more and more headache. This is not what they want to happen but it happens naturally.

There are all sorts of method that they can use to threaten people all around the world such as email, social networking sites, forums, links, websites and etc. Email is a communication tools that leads to romances and friendship development across the world. Ping flood, packets-with-payload or distributed DOS attacks have the potential to shut down a sites of any size, at inconvenience to any number of users. Nevertheless, the bumbling attempts to identify the source of the "love bug" email virus also demonstrates that damage can cross national boundaries.

Week 9 Poll Analysis

The above shows the result of the week 9 poll analysis. The question was categorize as easier than the poll the week before. This week the question is "Which of the following is not being categorize under Legal Issues?" There are 8 people who voted this poll. There are 3 choices that I give them such as Trademark, Retrieval, and Copyright. There are total of 9 votes this week.

4 people who do chose Copyright, 3 people taking Retrieval as their answer while 2 people choosing Trademark. The correct answer this week is RETRIEVAL because it is not a category of Legal Issues.

Service Mark In U.S.A (Part 2)

The rights to a service mark may be acquired in two ways. First, a business can register the mark with the government. Most service marks are eligible for registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Several state governments have separate registration requirements. Once a service mark has been registered, the law typically affords protection to the first mark filed with the government. Second, a business may acquire rights to a service mark through public use. However, a mark must be held out to the public regularly and continuously before it will receive legal protection. Sporadic or irregular use of a service mark will not insulate it from infringement.

To receive protection, a service mark must also be unique, unusual, or distinctive. Common, ordinary, and generic marks rarely qualify for protection.

Once a business has established a vested right in a service mark, the law forbids other businesses from advertising their services with deceptively similar marks. Service mark infringement occurs when a particular mark is easily confused with other marks already established in the same trade and geographic market. Greater latitude is given when businesses that share similar marks are in unrelated fields or offer services in different consumer markets. 

Do you think there is such a law protecting the service marks in Malaysia? Feel free to comment!

Reference

The Gale Group, 2008, Service Mark, [Online], 3rd of October 2011, 

       URL : http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Service+Mark 

Week 8 Poll Analysis

In the week 8 poll, we've asked our reader a quiz titled "Copyright infringement occur when linking to an image on another person's website". There are total of 7 people voted for the question. There are total of 2 votes for true and 5 votes for false. The correct answer is false.

Service Mark In U.S.A

What is a Service Mark? 


Service Mark is a trademark that is used in connection with services.


Businesses or companies uses service mark to identify their services and distinguish them from other services provided by different companies of the same field. Service marks normally consist of letters, words, symbols, and other devices that helps inform customers about the origin of the particular service. Trademarks, by contrast, are used to distinguish different competing products instead of services. For example, Fed-Ex is a service mark of a company which provides delivery services. And its competitor, DHL, which is also another delivery company. 


In the U.S, the service marks are regulated by the law of Unfair Competition. At the federal level, service mark infringement is governed by the LANHAM Trademark Act of 1946. At the state level, service mark infringement is governed by analogous Intellectual Property statutes.
In some states, the service mark infringement may give rise to a Cause of Action under the Common Law. This is because service marks are a particular type of trademark, the substantive and procedural rules governs both types if marks which are technically similar to each other. 


Any examples of service marks that can be found in Malaysia?  Please do feel free to comment in the comment box below. =)

Reference

The Gale Group, 2008, Service Mark, [Online], 3rd of October 2011, 

       URL : http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Service+Mark

Notices and Disclaimers Page

Due to the improvement of Internet in this 20th century, Notices and disclaimers page are really important for the users to know the new arrival news that is just being known by the newspaper or news in the television. Internet somehow might be faster that any other path to know the news nowadays due to the website of various of writer for the news that most probably written in the computer that can be uploaded into the internet.

Blog or website should include various notices and disclaimers page which sets out applicable copyright and trade-mark notices, disclaimers and other terms regarding use. For instance, visitors should be advised that the information contained on the site should not be relied upon as legal, business or tax advice and that the operator is not providing any warranty regarding the reliability of the content. The copyright notice may need to be set out in a particular manner to ensure protection under international copyright conventions.

The link to the notices and disclaimers page should be sufficiently descriptive in order to provide visitors to the Web site with adequate notice of its presence. For instance, it is advisable to utilize a label such as "legal terms" or "legal notices".

Due to the nature of the Web, a visitor to a Web site may not necessarily go through the main or home page in order to access a page on a particular site. They may end up on a particular page on a site from a link to that page on a third party’s site or as a result of a search conducted using one of the popular search engines on the Internet. Any notice placed only on the home page of a Web site will not be seen by such visitors. It is therefore critical to place important notices, or links to such notices, on practically each page on the Web site in order to ensure that regardless of the path chosen, each visitor will be given notice of such material.

Certain types of content placed on a Web site should be accompanied by additional and more prominent notices or disclaimers. Examples include downloadable software programs, data that may be relied upon (for instance, stock market or interest rate information) or tools (for instance, financial calculators). The owner of a Web site containing such content may wish to set out the notices and disclaimers in an on-line contract, which is discussed further below.

What do you think about the importance of the notices and disclaimers page to the blog and website? Drop down your comment if there is any information that you do not know about it or can share your opinion in the comment so that we can improve our knowledge about notices and disclaimers page.