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56-524: The site was founded in 2003 to cover theater news. As of September 2018, the website had a readership of 5.5 million monthly online visitors and an Alexa PageRank of 16,156 worldwide. The site also produces annual fan-voted awards and competitions related to various types of production. BroadwayWorld added a pay transparency rule to its job site in March 2021 due to the advocacy of On Our Team and Costume Professionals for Wage Equity. This article about

112-606: A third-party -supplied Mozilla plug-in called Search Status for the Firefox browser served as the only option for Firefox users after Amazon abandoned its A9 toolbar. On July 16, 2007, Alexa released an official toolbar for Firefox called Sparky. On 16 April 2008, many users reported drastic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released an updated ranking system, claiming that they would now take into account more sources of data "beyond Alexa Toolbar users". Using

168-400: A category or genus of product (aspirin as pain reliever that a generic manufacturer can call their product). A genericness argument alleges that a formerly-protectable mark has become generic in a specific market or industry as signifying not the producer but a category or genus of product. The functionality doctrine states that functional product features cannot be trademarked. Functionality

224-515: A defendant "passing off" a good or service utilizing a trademark that belongs to the plaintiff, usually with the intent of deceiving consumers into thinking that the good or service originated with the plaintiff. For example, in McDonald's Corp. v. Druck and Gerner, D.D.S., P.C. , McDonald's sued McDental, a dental services provider operated by two dentists, for trademark infringement. McDonald's presented evidence that it owned trademark rights in

280-488: A fair-use defense to a trademark infringement claim, the defendant must prove the three elements of the fair-use doctrine: (1) that the term was used in a way other than as a mark; (2) that the term was used to describe the goods or services offered or their geographic origin; and (3) that the use had been undertaken in good faith. Nominative fair use allows third parties to use another party's trademark to refer to that party's actual product or service. The use must not create

336-481: A family of marks beginning with the prefix “Mc,” that there was widespread public familiarity with that family of marks, and that survey evidence established that confusion was likely to occur from the use of the McDental name. McDental's owners denied any intention to evoke McDonald's marks in their adoption of the McDental name, alleging that they had never perceived or heard anyone else perceive an association between

392-418: A likelihood of confusion and cannot imply sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark owner where none exists. Injunctions are court orders commanding that the infringer immediately cease its unlawful activities. A plaintiff will be entitled to injunctive relief for trademark infringement if they show probable success on the merits and the possibility of irreparable injury. Pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 1117(a),

448-585: A luxury-automobile manufacturer with a reputation for producing exclusive vehicles with distinctive designs, brought a trademark infringement suit against Carl Roberts after Roberts began manufacturing and selling kits that would allow budget-conscious car enthusiasts to copy the exterior designs of Ferrari (e.g., the Daytona Spyder, the Testarossa) onto the undercarriage of less expensive vehicles. Although Roberts has shown that confusion did not exist at

504-555: A news website is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This United States theatre–related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Alexa ranking Alexa Internet, Inc. was a web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco , California . It was founded as an independent company by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat in 1996. Alexa provided web traffic data, global rankings, and other information on over 30 million websites. It

560-440: A plaintiff can recover the infringer's profits, any damages sustained, and the costs of the action. In assessing profits, the brand owner must prove only the gross amount of the defendant's sales. Thereafter, the defendant has the burden of providing evidence of any amount that should be deducted. An accounting of profits is proper in a trademark infringement case only where the defendant engages in willful infringement, meaning that

616-592: A product was manufactured by the trademark holder. Thus, for the purposes of a likelihood of confusion analysis, the relevant audience may not be the targeted purchasers at all, but rather the general public, otherwise known as the "person on the street." As articulated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit , trademark law protects the public from incurring harms caused by post-sale confusion: "Trademark laws exists to protect

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672-539: A purely analytics-focused company. On March 31, 2009, Alexa revealed a major website redesign. The redesigned site provided new web traffic metrics, including average page views per individual user, bounce rate (the rate of users who come to and then leave a webpage), and user time on the website . In the following weeks, Alexa added more features, including visitor demographics, clickstream , and web search traffic statistics. During this period, Alexa's algorithm had been evolving along with it. Statistics projection and

728-457: A purpose other than as a mark. The Lanham Act includes a fair-use exception, under § 1115(b)(4), for trademarks that consist of descriptive words, to prevent trademark monopolies over the use of descriptive terms. There are two types of fair use, descriptive fair use and nominative fair use. Descriptive fair use allows a third party to use another party's descriptive trademark to describe its own product or service. In order to successfully assert

784-505: A specific audience subgroup was reluctant to take part in the rankings. This caused some controversies over how representative Alexa's user base was of typical Internet behavior, especially for less-visited sites. In 2007, Michael Arrington provided examples of Alexa rankings known to contradict data from the comScore web analytics service, including ranking YouTube ahead of Google. In 2021 John Mueller from Google confirmed again that Google does not use Amazon Alexa Rank. Until 2007,

840-590: A toolbar; instead, it used data from users that had installed any of a number of browser extensions and from websites that had the Alexa script installed on their webpages. Alexa replaced their toolbar with browser extensions. These extensions were made available for Google Chrome and Firefox browsers. The Alexa browser extension displayed the Alexa Traffic Rank for websites, showed related websites, provided search analytics, and quickly allowed users to view

896-456: A trademark. The Supreme Court has held that a product is functional if: (1) it is essential to the use or purpose of the article, or if it affects the cost or quality of the article; OR (2) the exclusive use of the functional feature would put competitors at a significant disadvantage. Abandonment of a trademark occurs when the owner of the trademark deliberately ceases to use the trademark for three or more years, with no intention of using

952-497: A valid exception (e.g., comparative advertising) or defense (e.g., laches ) to infringement, or attack and cancel the underlying registration (e.g., for non-use) upon which the proceedings are based. Other defenses include fraud, genericness , functionality, abandonment , or fair use . Comparative advertising occurs when one party uses another party's trademark to refer to the trademark owner or its goods or services. The Federal Trade Commission allows comparative advertising where

1008-1380: A variety of factors, none of which is dispositive on its own. While each jurisdiction uses a slightly different test, every test considers (1) whether and to what extent the alleged infringer intended to infringe on the senior user's valid trademark rights, (2) evidence of any consumer confusion, and (3) factors that speak to the economic relationship between the consuming public and the two marks, products, or services. Keds Corp. v. Renee Int’l Trading Corp ., 888 F.2d 215 (1st Cir. 1989) Playtex Products, Inc. v. Georgia-Pacific Corp. , 390 F.3d 158 (2d Cir. 2004) KOS Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Andrx Corp ., 369 F.3d 700 (3d Cir. 2004). CareFirst of Maryland, Inc. v. First Care, P.C. , 434 F.3d 263 (4th Cir. 2006). Scott Fetzer Co. v. House of Vacuums Inc. , 381 F.3d 477 (5th Cir. 2004) AutoZone, Inc. v. Tandy Corp ., 373 F.3d 786 (6th Cir. 2004) Sullivan v. CBS Corp. , 385 F.3d 772 (7th Cir. 2004) Frosty Treats Inc. v. Sony Computer Entm't Am., Inc. , 426 F.3d 1001 (8th Cir. 2005) Australian Gold, Inc. v. Hatfield , 436 F.3d 1228 (10th Cir. 2006) Dippin’ Dots, Inc. v. Frosty Bites Distribution , LLC, 369 F.3d 1197 (11th Cir. 2004) Palm Bay Imports, Inc. v. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Maison Fondee En 1772 , 396 F.3d 1369 (Fed. Cir. 2005) The most famous of

1064-520: Is a recognized defense to trademark infringement in U.S. law. This defense prevents trademark protection from overriding patent protection by ensuring that no mark can be registered if it is functional as a whole. For example, in Valu Engineering, Inc. v. Rexnord Corp. , the court decided that certain conveyor belt shapes were functional due to their increased performance over alternative designs and were therefore not eligible to be considered

1120-441: Is a violation of the exclusive rights attached to a trademark without the authorization of the trademark owner or any licensees (provided that such authorization was within the scope of the licence). Infringement may occur when one party, the "infringer", uses a trademark which is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another party, especially in relation to products or services which are identical or similar to

1176-419: Is an equitable defense. The doctrine applies when a defendant affirmatively establishes: (1) knowledge by the plaintiff of facts constituting a cause of action or a reasonable opportunity to discover such facts; (2) an undue delay by the plaintiff in commencing an action; and (3) damage to the defendant resulting from the delay in bringing the action. A viable defense to trademark infringement may assert "[t]hat

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1232-573: The Alexa Pro service, website owners could sign up for "certified statistics", which allowed Alexa more access to a website's traffic data. Site owners input JavaScript code on each page of their website that, if permitted by the user's security and privacy settings, ran and sent traffic data to Alexa, allowing Alexa to display—or not display, depending on the owner's preference—more accurate statistics such as total page views and unique page views. Trademark infringement Trademark infringement

1288-502: The Alexa homepage, and the Alexa ranking of the website that the user is visiting. It also allowed the user to rate the website and view links to external, relevant websites. In early 2005, Alexa stated that there had been 10 million downloads of the toolbar, though the company did not provide statistics about active usage. Originally, web pages were only ranked amongst users who had the Alexa Toolbar installed, and could be biased if

1344-683: The Internet Archive through the Wayback Machine. They were last updated in May 2020, two years prior to the service's closure. Alexa used to rank sites based primarily on tracking a sample set of Internet traffic—users of its browser toolbar for the Internet Explorer , Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers. The Alexa Toolbar included a popup blocker (which stops unwanted ads), a search box, links to Amazon.com and

1400-499: The Ninth Circuit held that Playboy was likely to show that consumers may be attracted to competitors' products by free riding Playboy's reputation when using the trademarks "playboy" and "playmate", even if the consumers are well aware that they are not buying services from Playboy. Post-sale confusion occurs when the use of a trademark leads individuals of the general public (other than the purchaser) to mistakenly believe that

1456-517: The USPTO in such a way as "likely to cause confusion, . . . cause mistake, or to deceive. . . shall be liable in a civil action by the registrant . . . ." Where the respective marks, products, or services are not identical, similarity will generally be assessed by reference to whether there is a likelihood of confusion that consumers will believe the products or services originated from the trademark owner. A typical likelihood of confusion test balances

1512-502: The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit imposed secondary liability on a flea market landlord who provided the “necessary marketplace” for the sale of infringing goods. The court held that contributory trademark infringement existed because the landlord was willfully blind to its tenant's ongoing infringement. The party accused of infringement may be able to defeat infringement proceedings if it can establish

1568-454: The bases of the comparison are truthful, non-deceptive, and clearly specified. The user of the trademark cannot imply or suggest sponsorship, endorsement, or affiliation by the mark owner. If the user uses the trademark in a way that does not confuse or mislead consumers and only uses as much of the mark as necessary for identification (e.g., use of the words but not use of the same font or graphics), then this may be considered fair use. Laches

1624-434: The cessation of its website ranking and competitive analysis service, which has been available to the public for more than 25 years. From that day on, it was no longer possible to create accounts or buy subscriptions on the service. The statement first published on its website specifies the total cessation of the service as of May 1, 2022. Existing subscriptions would be available until May 1, 2022, UTC, after which everything on

1680-407: The commercial strength or public awareness of the junior user's mark, (3) consumer attentiveness to the product, (4) the length of time junior user has used the mark without causing confusion, (5) whether the junior user intended to cause confusion, (6) evidence of actual confusion, (7) trade and advertising channels for the competing products, (8) the similarity of the manufacturers’ sales efforts, (9)

1736-595: The company donated a copy of the archive, two terabytes in size, to the Library of Congress . Alexa continued to supply the Internet Archive with web crawls. In 1999, as the company moved away from its original vision of providing an "intelligent" search engine , Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for approximately US$ 250 million in Amazon stock . Alexa began a partnership with Google in early 2002 and with

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1792-473: The competing products’ similarity in the minds of consumers, and (10) facts suggesting that consumers would expect the junior user to manufacture both products or expand into the senior user's market. The Supreme Court first held that liability for trademark infringement could extend beyond direct infringers in Inwood Laboratories, Inc. v. Ives Laboratories, Inc. The Supreme Court articulated

1848-479: The following standard for contributory infringement: "If a manufacturer or distributor intentionally induces another to infringe a trademark, or if it continues to supply its product to one whom it knows or has reason to know is engaging in trademark infringement, the manufacturer or distributor is contributorily liable for any harm as a result of the deceit." For example, in Fonovisa, Inc. v. Cherry Auction, Inc. ,

1904-590: The foregoing tests is the one employed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the "DuPont" Factors). However, this is because it is the test used by USPTO when assessing the registrability of a mark upon application. In any legal action for trademark infringement in the United States, the court will apply the test of the circuit in which it is located. Courts assess likelihood of confusion in various contexts, including prior to

1960-609: The infringer ( bait-and-switch ). Under the Lanham Act, a plaintiff may bring a trademark infringement claim against a defendant for creating consumer confusion prior to the point of sale, even if the consumer confusion is resolved before the sale goes through. For example, in Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Netscape Communications Corp. , Playboy sued Netscape for selling banner ads using trademarked terms "playboy" and "playmate." The United States Court of Appeals for

2016-412: The intent to deceive the USPTO. Trademarks that evolve over time into a generic term for a class of items, rather than remaining a source-identifying distinctive term, may lose trademark status. Genericide is a doctrine in which a formerly-protectable mark is held to be unprotectable because it no longer signifies the source or producer of the product (e.g., Aspirin as a product made by Bayer) but instead

2072-399: The junior user is a much larger or better-known producer than the senior user. Reverse-confusion claims exist to prevent big companies from stealing marks or brands from existing, smaller companies. Factors contributing to a likelihood of reverse confusion include: (1) similarity between the senior and junior user's marks, (2) the conceptual strength or uniqueness of the senior user's mark and

2128-412: The junior user is said to free ride on the reputation and goodwill of the senior user. Direct confusion typically occurs if the senior user is a much larger or better-known producer than the junior user. Reverse confusion occurs if consumers incorrectly think that a later (junior) trademark user is the source of the prior (senior) trademark user's products or services. Reverse confusion typically occurs if

2184-524: The point of sale, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit concluded that allowing the kits to enter into commerce would dilute the Ferrari brand by diminishing the perceived exclusivity and quality that make the Daytona Spyder and Testarossa attractive to consumers. The court further held that the kits were designed to perfectly replicate the exterior of Ferrari's vehicles, and there

2240-522: The products or services which the registration covers. An owner of a trademark may commence civil legal proceedings against a party which infringes its registered trademark. In the United States, the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984 criminalized the intentional trade in counterfeit goods and services. If the respective marks and products or services are entirely dissimilar, trademark infringement may still be established if

2296-542: The public from confusion. The creation of confusion in the post-sale context can be harmful in that if there are too many knockoffs in the market, sales of the original may decline because the public is fearful that what they are purchasing may not be an original. Furthermore, the public may be deceived in the resale market if it requires expertise to distinguish between an original and a knockoff." For example, in Ferrari S.P.A. Esercizio v. Roberts , Ferrari S.P.A. Esercizio,

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2352-409: The rank is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a three-month period. The Alexa Traffic Rank could be used to monitor the popularity trend of a website and compare the popularity of different websites. The traffic rank used to be determined from data recollected from users that had the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. As of 2020, Alexa did not use

2408-639: The registered mark is well known pursuant to the Paris Convention . In the United States, a cause of action for use of a mark for such dissimilar services is called trademark dilution . In some jurisdictions a party other than the owner (e.g., a licensee) may be able to pursue trademark infringement proceedings against an infringer if the owner fails to do so. Section 32 of the Lanham Act states that those who use similar or identical trademarks, products, or services, to those already registered with

2464-411: The registration or the incontestable right to use the mark was obtained fraudulently." A defense of fraud by the trademark owner can be raised at any time, and includes proving that: (1) the applicant made a false representation to USPTO; (2) the false representation is material to the registrability of a mark; (3) the applicant had knowledge of the falsity; and (4) the applicant made representation with

2520-435: The sale (also known as initial interest confusion ), at the point of sale , and post-sale. Confusion may also be direct or reverse, depending on who the senior and junior user of the marks are. The most typical form of trademark infringement is point-of-sale confusion, which occurs when a consumer mistakenly believes that their product or service is from a company or brand in which it is not. This type of infringement involves

2576-453: The site would be removed and replaced with an "End of Service Notice". The alexa.com domain is now a landing page for Amazon Alexa products. A key metric published from Alexa Internet analytics was the Alexa Traffic Rank, also simply known as Alexa Rank. It was also referred to as Global Rank by Alexa Internet and was designed to be an estimate of a website's popularity. As of May 2018 , Alexa Internet's tooltip for Global Rank said

2632-416: The trademark again in the future. When a trademark is abandoned, the trademark owner may no longer claim rights to the trademark. In effect, this frees the trademark so that anyone else can use it without recourse from the original trademark owner. The Lanham Act's fair-use exception is an affirmative defense requiring the defendant to prove that the term was used in good faith and in a descriptive manner for

2688-550: The two marks. The United States District Court for the Northern District of New York found that the similarity between the McDental name and McDonald's family of brands beginning with “Mc” was obvious. The court held that McDonald's had shown that a likelihood of confusion existed, warranting the issuance of an injunction. Initial interest confusion occurs when an allegedly improper use of a trademark attracts potential purchasers to consider products or services provided by

2744-475: The use of their technology associated with a large network of certificated websites allowed them to keep ahead of the website traffic metrics around the world. Because of this, many large sites were using it as the main reference for popularity on the internet. On November 6, 2014, Amazon announced Amazon Alexa , their virtual assistant . Amazon already had trademarks for Alexa due to their ownership of Alexa Internet, Inc. On December 8, 2021, Amazon announced

2800-556: The web directory DMOZ in January 2003. In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and Web-crawling facilities to third-party programs through a comprehensive set of Web services and APIs . These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa's servers or elsewhere. In May 2006, Google was replaced by Windows Live Search as a provider of search results. In December 2006, Amazon released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it

2856-432: Was a strong likelihood of post-sale customer confusion. The Sixth Circuit held that Roberts's kits infringed upon the distinctive trade dress of Ferrari's vehicles, and a permanent injunction against Roberts was affirmed. Direct confusion occurs when consumers believe that the goods or services of a later (junior) trademark user come from, or are sponsored by, the prior (senior) trademark holder. In cases of direct confusion,

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2912-601: Was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $ 250 million in stock. Amazon discontinued the Alexa Internet service on May 1, 2022. Alexa estimated website traffic based on a sample of millions of Internet users using browser extensions as well as from sites that had chosen to install an Alexa script.  As of 2020, its website was visited by over 400 million people every month. Alexa Internet was founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat . The company's name

2968-564: Was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt , drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world and the potential of the Internet to become a similar store of knowledge. Alexa initially offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next based on the traffic patterns of its user community. The company also offered context for each site visited: to whom it

3024-478: Was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated. Alexa's operations grew to include the archiving of web pages as they are "crawled" and examined by an automated computer program (nicknamed a "bot" or "web crawler"). This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive , accessible through the Wayback Machine . In 1998,

3080-449: Was stealing traffic graphs for profit and that the primary purpose of his site was to display graphs that were generated by Alexa's servers. Hornbaker had removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007. On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no longer accepting new customers and that the service would be deprecated or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009. Thereafter, Alexa became

3136-534: Was the first major application built on the company's Web platform. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to limit comparisons to three websites, reduce the size of embedded graphs in Flash , and add mandatory embedded BritePic advertisements. In April 2007, the company filed a lawsuit, Alexa v. Hornbaker, to stop trademark infringement by the Statsaholic service. In the lawsuit, Alexa alleged that Ron Hornbaker

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