Hi friends,

This post is meant to give you a heads up when it comes to protecting your website. I manufacture and distribute an electronic moving and glowing Fireflies product with my partner, Kim. Since 2003 we have sold this cool gadget as Magical Fireflies under the url with the same name. In 2004 another website popped up selling their version of the electronic fireflies that are very lame – basically they are stagnant lights that only blink on and off “kinda like last year’s broken Xmas lights.”

So what do these creeps do? Five years later (last January 2008) they trademark the the name we have been using “Magical Fireflies”, hire a fancy lawyer, and sue to have our site transfered to them! This unscrupulous website is called Firefly Magic. Not once did they try to contact us in the 5 years we have been online. The only communication they initiated to us was to inform us that they were planning on stealing our website. We filed the response ourselves to the National Arbitration Forum-we were very confident with our evidence. This was probably a mistake, since I am sure their lawyer was much more schooled in the domain registry law lingo. But our first mistake was not having our name trademarked from the get-go.

We were naive to think that there were such unsavory thieves slinking around. We lost our nice high-ranking PR 4 website and now our customers are left not knowing where to find us.

But we have bounced back under a new name – we are now called Zen Fireflies and our site is at http://www.zenfireflies.com . We are PPC and radio advertising-and I am writing blogs and articles to spread the word. Do not let this happen to you.

Keep in mind that Kim and I had our original website protected under copyright laws since 2003. I clearly used the name “magical” to describe the fireflies for years, this is why we did not think we needed a lawyer – Copyright laws clearly state that work which is marked as copyrighted, is therefore protected.

Theoretically, the descriptive way in which you present whatever you are selling or writing about is yours and no one can take that from you. Again, this is why we did not hire a lawyer-clearly we would win, right? Well, we didn’t.

When things like this happen, I always try to look at the bright side. I know our loyal customers will find us. The alternative is using a product that is totally NOT magical. I know karma will bite Firefly Magic in the butt, and I know whoever reads this post will spread the word, and learn from our mistakes. Thanks for listening, and best of luck to all of you!

Mark/Zen Fireflies