usually also with trademarks, in australia anyway, you HAVE to defend your trademark, if you don’t send threatening letters you can lose your mark registration. and – i may be wrong – i’m pretty sure it’s also wrong to just send the letter, you got to back it up with actual legal action.

my view is the whole thing is just SPAM to get the /link/ associated to the keyword.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

H. Pissfahrt (Mrs)
Upper Bluttfueck, Vic. 3666

I was around for the first legal spam

I just missed that, but arrived while the combo of that and the September that never ended was still cursed on a regular basis.

While I appreciate you are expressing yourself here in good faith, I find myself once again forced into the educator’s role. I write here with a polite though heavy heart.

Please try to understand my situation, before I must gently castigate you. When I began my business I did not expect to be spending all my time cleaning the world of wrongdoings, not only against me but the position I stand in. My business name is continually taken in vain, yet I am a purveyor of some of the finest horseshit available and imaginable.

I exhort you, with the sincerest kindness, to refrain from dropping my business name into any of your future doings, be that in speech, writing or thought.

Yours faithfully,
Rusty Bellwether
4560395 Central City
Manhattan

ps. I am registering for ownership of the words “long time”, due to the way it suits my business, so please be similarly warned.

As a practical matter, when you describe sales effectiveness, there are a wide range of terms available such as: sales excellence, sales savvy, sales mastery, sales acumen, sales efficiency, and many more.

Uh-oh. Gerhard, you’d better hope that Sales Excellence, Inc. doesn’t see this.

I just ran across an article you wrote on Larvatus Prodeo entitled Economy Tanks, blogs suffer!, http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/20/economy-tanks-blogs-suffer-or-advertising-and-readership-accountability-post/#comment-497628, and I would like to raise an issue that is of concern to Selling Power magazine, which is the use of our trademark.

The word “Selling Power” is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for sales effectiveness. For example you wrote: “The advantage of doing it this way though is that you get greater selling power through aggregating the readership of all the sites participating in the network…” We do not condone such uses of our trademark.

As a practical matter, when you describe sales effectiveness, there are a wide range of terms available such as: sales excellence, sales savvy, sales mastery, sales acumen, sales efficiency, and many more.

The reason for this letter is to educate writers like yourself that we want to protect our trademark, since we don’t want to risk Selling Power being declared by the courts a generic word. Therefore we ask you not to use Selling Power as a phrase since it is our legal trademark.

We would like to receive a written acknowledgment of this letter stating that you will in the future identify Selling Power as a trademark if you should write about our magazine, and not use Selling Power as a phrase. If we do not hear from you, we will need to take further action.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

All the best,

Gerhard Gschwandtner
Founder and Publisher
Selling Power
1140 International Parkway
Fredericksburg VA 22406
Office: 540-752-7000 Cell: 540-273-2555

P.S. Watch Selling Power videos online http://www.sellingpower.com/video

GG:ts