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The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has thrown out a complaint from the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The preacher had claimed he had a common-law trademark on his name which was being breached by the parody site www.jerryfalwell.com. WIPO policy is that personal names should only be protected if they are being commercially expolited, and concluded:
The complainant has failed to show that his name, well known as it is, has been used in a trademark sense as a label of particular goods or services. There are many well-known ministers, religious figures and academics. Are their sermons or lectures to be considered commercial goods?
Falwell plans to bring a case in a US court instead. Site poking fun at Falwell allowed to continue—Associated Press, June 7th 2002.
Posted in
Hypocrisy
and Jerry Falwell
at 15:25. Last modified on May 16 2007 at 13:43.
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Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
This is not a contacts site. If you are looking for help regarding a particular path, I suggest The Witches' Voice, which does operate a contacts service.
Allowed HTML:
a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ol, ul, li, blockquote, q, pre. If your name has accents in it, things will work better if you use the XHTML entities for those letters. The same applies if you are using a word processor to compose your comment, then copying and pasting the text—either turn off curly quotes and avoid using em-dashes, or edit your comment after pasting to get rid of them. Garbled comments usually get deleted.