Comments on: Mahalo Promotes Bootleg Products

By: Blue Acorn

Blue Acorn — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:23:31 +0000

Thanks for the comment Maurice – if your question is to the legality involved of being able to manufacture and distribute these types of t-shirts – then that issue is covered under copyright infringement laws present in the country applicable. Trademark infringement, according to US law, occurs when someone uses a design that is identical or similar to an existing trademark. Guinness is trademarked as a standard character mark (you can search on USPTO.gov to find out details of their trademark) which means that even using the name Guinness in a product for sale without their permission violates that law. As you can see in the examples provided, some violate the trademark based on the logo being used without permission and some violate the trademark just by using the word Guinness. Now, I’m no legal expert but that is my interpretation of the law.

If your question is more concerned about Mahalo showing results for the satirical t-shirts then that is fine, but it still does not deter from the fact that these products are being distributed illegally. Thus, they would not belong in the Guinness category to begin with but in a more appropriate category.

By: Maurice

Maurice — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:52:15 +0000

Interesting point but how do you think satire and parody play into this – say a satirical tshirt about an Irish political issue but using Guinness logotype/style.

By: C.K.

C.K. — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:57:49 +0000

Just wanted to let you know that I took a look at the page and updated the Merchandise section. This is one of our older pages, and I’ve put it on the Update rotation, so it should be improved drastically very soon.

Cheers,

C.K. Sample III
Editorial Director, Mahalo

By: Blue Acorn

Blue Acorn — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:17:53 +0000

Thanks Jason for taking the time to provide your input and your honest feedback. I understand that Mahalo is still fairly new and results get better with community input and feedback such as this. The question you’ve raised regarding “policing” the internet is definitely a gray area for you. The matter of indexing should be yes, regardless of what the content is (given that it is valuable). The matter of policing should be handled by the respective copyright holders.

However, when you have chosen a few (four in this case) links to list for Guinness Merchandise, and one of those is a blatant disregard for proper licensing, when there are other, quality legitimate sources out there it comes down to a matter of due diligence. Granted, I’m sure it is impossible for every editor to become familiar with so many topics and it takes community feedback (such as mine that I provided) to help improve the results. I’ve provided my feedback (by submitting a problem) and suggested the link to BeerTees.com and will await a response. Thanks for chiming in!

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:04:18 +0000

Mahalo for checking out Mahalo!

This is a very interesting debate. Mahalo is community edited so the best thing for you to do is:

a) post good links to the page
b) bring up the issue on the message board on that page
c) write a blog post about the issue so we are forced to deal with it (oh wait! you already did!

If you do A&B the manager of the page will start a dialogue with you and I’m sure they will–at the very least–add the proper links to the page.

Not sure if our role is to be the police of the internet, but not sure it isn’t. If folks are looking for bootleg stuff on Google, Yahoo, etc. clearly Google and Yahoo are not at fault. If they don’t remove are they at fault? I don’t think so, they index everything including the bad stuff. For us, with humans and community editing, I’m guessing you can make the argument that we have a higher standard. However, we should still index everything folks are looking for no? Not sure we will meet that higher standard all the time in the short term. Very hard issue you bring up… there is no clear answer.

Humans are imperfect, just like machines, and it will take debate and community effort to solve these issues. I’m not the decision maker on these type of things, the community is.

Thanks for taking the time to bring up the issue. You’ve given us a lot to think about.

best jason