WaterLife Copyright And Trademark Infringement
WaterLife Copyright And Trademark Infringement
Having your work stolen and your name used is one of the dangers that all businesses face. Copyright and Trademark Infringement are realties in todays global marketplace. VitalBodies had this happen some time back…
The water filter image in the advertisement below, was taken from our web site without permission.
Newspaper advertisement:
WaterLife Trademark Copyright Infringement
We have never been contacted by the company using our name and images.
A person in Israel wrote us and let us know about this ad in the newspaper. The person that pointed this out to us also felt that the company name (WaterLife) they are using was stolen from yet another company.
They wrote:
“The dealer calls himself Waterlife U.S.A. which is name stolen from a USA tropical fish dealer. ”
“They have several times used fraudulent advertising. ”
See our original image below: (of our own kitchen filter!)
No one ever bought this filter from us, as this was our personal kitchen water filter. this was perhaps the earliest filter we posted online. Our design changed before we ever sold one. The brown VitalBodies label you see in the image was a print out on recycled paper and just taped on the filter system for our photograph of the filter system as we were just getting started testing the market and making a prototype.
Makes you wonder what happened to the unfortunate customers that called the 1-800-39-39-28 number…
This type of thing is sadly very common. However, typically watermarking the image, as you did in this case by putting the URL over the filter, usually discourages the behavior. I have not seen something so brazen before and it speaks very lowly of the professionalism of the company that designed the ad.
It is, however, worth noting that many time these kinds of ads are designed by a third party company or even the newspaper itself so it *might* not be a reflection on the company in the ad, but the designers.
Still, it is very frustrating and I would definitely contact the company to see what can be done.
If there is anything that I can do to help, please let me know!
Thank you for your comments.
BRAZEN, that definitely fits!
It is worth noting that it *might* not be the company and that was well worth pointing out, thank you. One would hope a company would review the ads they use but that might always be possible in every case.
In composing the the post VitalBodies tried not to outright accuse anyone in particular, but merely present the facts and the evidence.
We did attempt to contact the government agency in Israel that handles this. Even the seemingly simple act of contacting another country that might use a different character set gets complicated if one is not used to doing so. Plus getting a message back in another language and or character set can just seem like spam if one is not watching out for that.