Copyright Aid

We sell new fat burners on Ebay by the company:

Genetic labs

they sell..

T9 Blaze

T6 Burn

T5 Ignite

we have had our listing removed by a rival company..

Extreme labs

they sell

T9 black fury

T6 storm

T5 dominate


they own relevant copyrights to the above, but they are many T5 T6 and T9 products on the market and on ebay!

They are saying by putting T9 T6 or T5 in the title along with the word extreme infringes one more than one of there copyrights?

i have had contact with people who tell me this is highly inaccurate

but the challenge is, i cannot list the item on ebay even though there are other T5 T9 and T6 listed all over ebay

as this company says im infringing and clearly know how to play the eBay system

any help on this matter would be great!

Hi benn_moon,
I think you are right that this has nothing to do with copyright. Something as short as 'T6' cannot be subject to copyright simply because there is no originality in it.

I think that trade mark may well be the area of intellectual property on which the Ebay challenge has been made. Trade mark protection operates differently to copyright. It is intended to prevent the public being confused into buying Product A thinking that it is made by Company B, due to the similarity in branding, whereas in fact Product A is made by someone else, and so Company B's brand is damaged and sales may be lost. You can read more about this on the UK Intellectual Property Office website. Short words etc may registered as trade marks, and so it is possible that using T6 etc could infringe.

You didn't say what type of products the other company were selling, but as I can only find one registered trade mark owner for T9 Black Fury (details here) and T6 Storm (details here) namely, Premium Leisure Distribution Ltd, I assume their products are the ones you are talking about. However you mentioned a different company (Extreme Labs) as the one which has objected to your use of T9 Blaze etc. According to their website, Extreme do not manufacture the products they sell. Only the registered owner of the trade mark may bring a legitimate take down claim and so you could ask Ebay what proof they have that Extreme Labs have any right to make this claim. It is of course possible that Extreme Labs is a trading name or subsidiary of Premier Leisure Distribution Ltd, in which case it would be a legitimate claim. However I can find no link between the two companies other than in the names of some of the products Extreme sells.

It would seem that seem the registered trade marks are for health food and body building supplements etc, so obviously the two groups of products (Genetic's and Extreme's) are similar, and thus it boils down to whether the registered trade mark owners could convince a court that the names of your and their products are sufficiently similar as to confuse the public as to the true origin of your goods. You say that the products you sell come from Genetic Labs, and as they obviously chose the names T9 Blaze, T6 Burn and T5 Ignite and not you, the dispute is really between them and Premier Leisure Distribution Ltd, and so you need to take the matter up with your supplier. As far as I can tell Genetic labs are not a UK company (there are few details on their website or Facebook page).

If Genetic Labs are not prepared to defend their brands on Ebay, I don't see an easy or cheap way of resolving this.

Both Extreme Labs and Premium Leisure share the same Bristol address, so it seems they are linked.

http://www.endole.co.uk/company/0870631 ... bs-limited

http://www.endole.co.uk/company/0804537 ... on-limited

As the OP says suggests, the T5, T6, T9 nomenclature seems to be a common "standard" across multiple manufacturers, so Extreme Labs acting in this way is a bit like Soltan objecting to other suncream products with the same SPF factor as their own!

It seems that Extreme Labs specifically objected to listings of rival product with a T number and the word "extreme" in the listing, and yet along with actual Extreme Labs products on eBay, there are a number of different ones with "Extreme" either in the name (e.g. "T5 Matrix Extreme" "T5 Extreme Plus") or in the listing as a general description.

Nick Cooper wrote:Both Extreme Labs and Premium Leisure share the same Bristol address, so it seems they are linked.

http://www.endole.co.uk/company/0870631 ... bs-limited

http://www.endole.co.uk/company/0804537 ... on-limited

Thanks Nick. Based on that information, I agree with you that the companies are probably linked, and so Extreme has standing to issue the take down notice to Ebay. Whether they have a trade mark infringement claim which the court would uphold is a different matter. Unfortunately the OP would find it difficult to fight this with Ebay without the backing of Genetic.

It certainly appears to be an abuse of eBay's procedures, but beyond the OP pointing out to them that the T number is not unique to one brand or the other, I can't see what else they can do.