Trademark Non-Infringement; or, Help, I’m Being Stalked by an Asshole

  • Unknown's avatar
    siegelmaxwellc · Member ·

    So, I’m a writer. There is a word—which, to avoid personal details, I shall denote by X—which occurs in the title of my current work-in-progress novel. X is also the name of a principal character of my story.

    The reason this is relevant to wordpress is that last summer, I started posting chapters of my story on my wordpress website, and, within a day or two, I found myself being harangued by an author (who I will refer to as A) who had filed a USPTO trademark for the word X. After he refused to compromise, he reported my website as being in violation of his trademark and my site was removed, though I managed to get it back by scrubbing all mentions of X from my website.

    A lawyer friend of mine informs me that A’s trademark applies only to the word X as the title of a PRINTED work or the name of a series of PRINTED works. This means A can use his trademark to stop me from printing physical copies of my story, but he has absolutely no control over what anyone does with the word X in digital media.

    My problem is, I’m planning on releasing my story as a web serial in the near future, and as part of building my own brand, I want to be able to talk about my story on my wordpress website. Unfortunately, A is subscribed to my blog and has software in place to notify him whenever anyone uses X, and I am certain that he will try to get me deplatformed again if I try anything. Of course, he has no rights to do this, but, knowing how lawsuit-averse wordpress is, management is likely to cave to his (illegal) demands.

    My friend tells me that this case would be a slam dunk for an attorney, but I don’t have the money for one, nor do I want to get into a protracted legal battle with A. I don’t like being held hostage by this guy in this way. What, if anything, can I do?

    If I post my stuff and he tries to deplatform me again, will I be able to get the wordpress people to ignore his ungrounded claims of a website infringing on his print-medium trademark?

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • aleone89 · Staff ·

    Hey there!

    It looks like you may have been in contact with us about this issue before via email.

    We’d need you to continue that dialogue via that email if you still have this, as we are unable to assist with this issue via the forums.

    If need be, please reach out to us here: (email visible only to moderators and staff) whereby we can properly guide you.

    Many thanks.

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