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Commerce Against Artists Part Two
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?
