Re: Is this a trademark violation?

I used to work for cha cha... Or at least, I trained their staff at my old
job. They're a text message question answering service based in the us but
using Philippine staff.
On Feb 8, 2013 1:48 PM, "Daniel R. Tobias" <[email protected]> wrote:

> I just ran into this Twitter account:
>
> https://twitter.com/Wikipedia411
>
> It has "Wikipedia" as part of its username/URL, and uses
> "Wikipedia.org" as its account name (displayed at the top of its
> tweets). However, the description on its account page says "Facts
> brought to you daily. Not affiliated with Wikipedia, aggregate
> content generator."
>
> Where copyright is concerned, it would probably be in violation of
> the license of Wikipedia if it used more than fair-use amounts of
> Wikipedia text, since there's reference to credits or license, but if
> they just paraphrase facts derived from Wikipedia (as they seem to be
> doing, and just about the only way to get anything from Wikipedia
> into 140 characters anyway) they're probably in the clear there since
> facts are not copyrightable (only the expression of them).
>
> However, it is trademark law they are most clearly afoul of; despite
> their disclaimer, they're using an account name that seems to imply
> that they represent Wikipedia (you have to pull up their profile page
> to find out they're not official, so lots of people who see retweeted
> tweets from them will think they're coming from Wikipedia), and they
> also use Wikipedia's logo as their icon.
>
> While most of their tweets have facts that presumably came from
> Wikipedia, the stream is peppered with tweets with "teaser" text and
> a link, which when followed doesn't go to Wikipedia but to some site
> called ChaCha (the link destination, as usual on Twitter, is
> obfuscated by the use of link-shorteners). That site has the typical
> annoying style of many modern websites of presenting its content in
> "slideshow" style with bite-size chunks of content that are "1 of 10"
> and you have to keep following "Next" links to get to the rest of the
> feature, and if you don't use AdBlock Plus they're all surrounded by
> annoying ads, some of which blast sound at you, and try to spawn
> popups and the like.
>
> --
> == Dan ==
> Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
> Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
> Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
>
>
>
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