The U.S. Justice Department is reportedly investigating online auctioneer eBay, Inc. to determine whether its efforts to block price comparison search software from probing its Web site are anti-competitive.
Hi, I suppose this is a side issue but perhaps it's a little important. I'm a cyber speculator and have received a letter from eBay stating it intends to pursue legal action against any company that uses the three letter "bay" in their name. I was wondering if anybody else out there has received threatening letters from the eBay legal department about this seeming takeover and alleged claim of total control and ownership of a very commonly used small 3-letter word in the English language. I would appreciate any supportive advice or perhaps possible group action to prevent eBay's claim of exclusive ownership of the "bay" letter combination. Who knows, we may all have to end up paying royalties to use this or perhaps other names. Just imagine this: most people only have a working vocabulary of around 10,000 words. If all these words became copyrighted company names by say 10,000 non-competitive companies like eBay, this would create a lawyer utopia. Everybody would sue everybody else and we'd all get rich, right? I think not. Common sense should prevail somewhere in the process.
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U.S. Justice Department Launches eBay Anti-Competition Probe
Posted by: Chet Dembeck & Robert Conlin February 4, 2000 12:00 AMThe U.S. Justice Department is reportedly investigating online auctioneer eBay, Inc. to determine whether its efforts to block price comparison search software from probing its Web site are anti-competitive.
I suppose this is a side issue but perhaps it's a little important. I'm a cyber speculator and have received a letter from eBay stating it intends to pursue legal action against any company that uses the three letter "bay" in their name. I was wondering if anybody else out there has received threatening letters from the eBay legal department about this seeming takeover and alleged claim of total control and ownership of a very commonly used small 3-letter word in the English language. I would appreciate any supportive advice or perhaps possible group action to prevent eBay's claim of exclusive ownership of the "bay" letter combination. Who knows, we may all have to end up paying royalties to use this or perhaps other names. Just imagine this: most people only have a working vocabulary of around 10,000 words. If all these words became copyrighted company names by say 10,000 non-competitive companies like eBay, this would create a lawyer utopia. Everybody would sue everybody else and we'd all get rich, right? I think not. Common sense should prevail somewhere in the process.