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July 06, 2006

Yell Threatens to Shut Down Yellowikis

Winter FlowerYellowikis is a yellow pages wiki community, started by a dad and a daughter, with 500 editors collaborating on open business listings.  Now Yell, the world's largest yellow pages publisher, based in the UK, is threatening them to shut down.

Yell is demanding that Paul and Rosa close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, whereas Yellowikis had a loss of $500. The $500 was used to print T-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt.

Now last I checked, yellow was a color, and yellow pages was a generic term.  Maybe that's why the Yell Group plc picked a more unique name themselves, but its hard to see the trademark infringement.  But as a small wiki community, its even harder to see them standing against the cease and desist letter.

UPDATE: Chuqui: "Yellow Pages is not a trademark in the U.S. It *is* a trademark in the U.K. That's why Sun's Yellow Pages became NIS. so they have a trademark issue in the U.K. here."  Contrary opinions in comments below.

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Yell Threatens to Shut Down Yellowikis:

» Yell.com Threatens to Shutdown YellowWikis from eucap
David versus Goliath story; an example of monster corporation taking advantage of the current pro trademark and copyright legislation to kill off a startup. Picked up from Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Yell Threatens to Shut Down Yellowikis. Yell.com is alre... [Read More]

» Yellow pages, UK Trademark law, wikis and passing off. from Vendorprisey
I sense I may be unpopular in parts of the sphere for this post-response. Cease and desists are the talk of  town at the moment, what with the web2.0 farce, Redmonk and Gartner, and now  Ross highlighted the challenges that Yellowiki faces.... [Read More]

» Wikis and Pandora Boxes from E-Communications & Community
Yellowikis was started in 2004 by father and daughter team, Paul Youlten and 14-year old Rosa Blaus. Yellowikis is an online, participatory directory, which uses free wiki software MediaWiki as its technology framework. The site is run as a hobby... [Read More]

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