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back to article Court forces bisexual budgie smuggling blogger to go down

Bisexual blogger, Dave Evans, has been ordered by an Australian Federal Court to shut down his websites because they featured swimwear manufacturer Speedo’s swimming costumes and domain names using the company's trademark. The manufacturer took Evans to the Federal Court, claiming his websites infringed trademarks and …

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  1. carter brandon

    There's skint and there's really skint. Really skint is when you can't afford a free lawyer.

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  2. Gordon 10

    Bizarre

    Seems like the guy was doing nothing wrong under normal site naming rules.

    If it offended speedo that much it would have been much simpler and cheaper to buy him then shut him down.

    Muppets.

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    1. Lamont Cranston
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      Infringing on their trademark, wasn't he?

      Probably would have gone the same way if he'd set up a site of guys being sucked off by Hoovers.

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  3. Winkypop Silver badge
    Trollface

    Bonnie Doon?

    No more serenity then...

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  4. AdamWill

    not exactly

    It's not exactly a dumb move by Speedo, because their brand is in some danger of becoming generic, at which point they lose trademark protection on it. There's already a tendency in, certain, er, circles - SO I HEAR - to refer to any kind of male swimwear as 'speedos', and if that reaches a certain point without Speedo making a decent effort to stop it, their trademark will go away, which they really wouldn't want.

    This is actually a pretty good example of a _good_ trademark action, really, with the exception they could probably have made a softly-softly approach first. I mean, if you just go around letting people use your trademark in a textbook generic fashion (I rather suspect all the models on the guy's site weren't necessarily wearing *Speedo* speedos) on popular websites, that's a pretty damn powerful argument that your trademark's gone generic.

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    1. Battle Stations
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      Not so

      When did you last hear Hoover grumbling about every vacuum cleaner and its dog being called "the Hoover" ?

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      1. AdamWill
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        all the time

        Hoover *hates* that. It's one of the all-time classic cases that trademark lawyers forever cite in defense of their trademark suits - "we don't want to be Hoover".

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  5. Craig 28

    British company?

    I've nothing but sympathy for the guy but what the hell has the British company remark got to do with anything? I know that certain Australians still have resentment over how Australia was handled in the past, I can even understand that, but this is a completely separate issue which has nothing to do with the nationality of any company involved.

    Agreed on making a softer approach first though.

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