Diggdot.us and Others Forced to Remove ‘Digg’ from Address
If you are a reader of Digg, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, or all three, you’ve probably visited or at least heard of Diggdot.us. It’s a news aggregator that retrieves articles from the three previously listed sites. It’s been around for about a year, and just recently they received a cease & desist letter from Digg’s lawyers saying that they could not use Digg in their name or web address. Others have received the same letter, and one such site, ’digggames’ have shut themselves down because of it. Diggdot.us decided not to shutdown, instead changing their name to Doggdot.us in hopes of satisfying Digg lawyers.
I understand that Digg needs to protect their trademark, however the sites that are being shutdown appear to promote Digg, not harm it, and yet they’re not exempt. If you take a look at Digg.com, you’ll notice that the word ‘Digg’ isn’t the only trademarked word. If you have a website that uses ‘Digg’, ‘Digg it’, ‘Dugg’, or ‘Digg this,’ you just might receive the same cease and desist letter in the mail!
My sympathy goes out to all of the people that have put so much effort into their “Digg” promoting site only to have to shut it down. I’m sure it’s leaving quite a few people with a bad taste in their mouth, however I’m sure Digg doesn’t really have a whole lot of choice when it comes to protecting their Trademark.
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Tags: Web Sites
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Banning use of Digg this makes absolutely no sense. Take a page from the book of Google. They did not like people using Google to mean any old web search, because this would destroy their Trademark and make it a ‘generic’ term. However, they said proper use was using it to mean using the Google search engine.
If digg doesn’t want people digging things, they might as well start DIGGing their coffin now.
this is one of many reasons we need drastic patent/copyright/trademark reform. There really isn’t anything they can do in terms of laws that stand now, if they want to maintain their rights to such names.
Here’s a list of sites using said names:
[insidesocialnews.blogspot.com]
one that hasn’t been listed on this post is [overdugg.com] otherwise it is pretty complete as I helped with it, and compared it to sites I had known as well.
lol, on that doggdot.us a news post from Digg shows “source: d*gg”
There was a similar problem with WordPress a while back.
Digg is just cutting out great ways of traffic and popularity, not to mention pissing off fans.