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Commerce Against Artists Part Two

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Wolfgang Bromberger

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User since: 14 Dec 1998

Articles written: 34

Accoring to http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/5624/1.html there is a new case of money against art, happening now in Europe, right after the etoy cause.

A french finance enterprise is sueing the art and science network "Leonardo" because of name patents. The French enterprise wants to prohibit the 30 year old art network to use the word "Leonardo" on their website or any other product or service and wants over one Million Dollars "for the harm".

In difference to the etoy issue, this is not a small modern provocative art group but a network established since decades with over 3000 partly prominent members.

According to a press statement by Leonardo, is the issue brought to court by the company "Transasia Corporation" with others, who claim to have the rights patented since short time of the trade marks of Leonardo, Leonardo Invest, Leonardo Finances, Leonardo Partners and Leonardo Experts.
One main arguments in the court of Nanterre, France is referring to the results of search engines, where a search for the word "Leonardo" show not only their own sites, but also sites of the art and science network Leonardo.

Now, to make that claims worse, they say that their income come by 50 % from their Internet marketing efforts. They argue that because of their bad influenced rankings at the search engines they lose profits of 20 %, therefore Transasia wants from the organisation not only to stop the use of first name da Vinci on all their pages and give them one Million Dollars for their lost income.

At the french department of the organisation there has been as result of this investigation a house search- 8 police men and a civilian searched the 80 year old widow of the founder of the network with her 8 year old nephew. All papers where Leonardo was included was copied. As the house has big archive of the network, copying all might take some time.

Seems like the fight for the use and ownerships of words and symbols on a global economy though Internet has begun. Where will you stand?

http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/#raid

Wolfgang .wolf Bromberger has been around online since 1996. He started to get into web design after he and some other students developed a concept for the online presence of their home town, Salzburg in Austria, a site Bill Gates used years later as a good example of e-government (as still not nearly all points of the concept have been made reality, .wolf disagrees).
Being interested in search engines and information systems, .wolf specialized in search engine optimization, online promotion and analysis.
.wolf was one of the founding fathers of evolt.org
He is working for Kreiseder.com and can also be reached there.
He is always interested in learning new programming or other web related skills, when time permits.

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