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Nissan vs Nissan – Trademark Lawsuit

October 1, 2007 | mark | Rants

If you’ve ever visited Nissan.com you’ll know the story of Uzi Nissan being sued by Nissan Motor Corp. Having been sued over trademark infringement before, I know how hard this must have been for Uzi – and how hard the decision to appeal must have been.

Nissan.com is a descriptive name in the case of Uzi Nissan, which means that it’s not a strong trademark (he can’t sue anyone else who is using it descriptively) but he also can’t be sued for using his own name – especially with a history of 20 years of use. Any junior TM attorney will tell you that. And yet Nissan went after him with a vengance, all the way to the supreme court – Nissan Motor Corp’s petition was rejected.

Uzi finally won and kept the name and it must have cost him a small fortune to do so.

Nissan’s behavior makes me ashamed to own a Nissan XTerra and I’ll be considering this when I make my next purchase decision.

One Comment

    hb

    I have a friend who wrote a book. In it he had the people driving a Nissan Maxima, a Toyota Rav4 and a Chevy Blazer. Does he have to have permission to use these in his book? It’s an ebook he sells on the internet.

    Thanks

    Commented on March 4, 2012 at 1:58 pm

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My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.