I got an email this morning from the CEO of TRUCK ADS LLC, asking me to change content of this post on our freo.com group blog because it supposedly infringes on a trademark held by TRUCK ADS LLC. My post was criticising the use of trucks to cruise Fremantle where the only purpose of the truck was to carry an advertisement on the back. Here’s the guts of that email:


From: TRUCKADS < … >
To: info@freo.com
Subject: TRUCKADS TRADEMARK 2838348
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:34:28 -0500
Organization: TRUCKADS

Hi –

Do you think you could do me a favor and change the title in your blog? Perhaps TRUCK ADVERTISING or MOBILE BILLBOARDS.

TRUCK ADS MUST GO! http://freo.com/archives/2004/11/19/truck-advertisments-must-go/

This is not exactly helping our business. Your reference to TRUCK ADS is an assault on our trademark without just cause.

Best Regards… Rod

Rod Harris
President / CEO
mailto: …

Thanks for the email Rod. You start off nice and politely, but what is this “… an assault on our trademark without just cause”? I’m not sure about that. I’m not inclined to change my post on freo.com without a really good reason. I don’t think I’ve assaulted anybody’s trademark by using the words Truck and Ads next to each other in the title of a blog post.

Thankfully, there is place that can help with this sort of thing. I’ve reported the email to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, and George Washington School of Law clinics. They keep a database, and provide some limited legal comment on emails and notices like this. Will be interesting to see what they say.

I’ll report back what happens…

Historical note: I did get a similar email from some months ago complaining about the URL for the post in question. At that time I changed the relevant bit of the url to truck-advertisments.

[Update 10/5/2005: The cool-named chillbot at chillingeffects.org emailed me to let me know that the original notice I received has now been put up on chillingeffects.org. There are no annotations or comments there yet, though.]