5 ms·

Surely it's not hard to solve this one? Buy the site. Acquisition style. Now they keep the community, the fan base, the long tail, and the passionate founder.

Surely it's not hard to solve this one? Buy the site. Acquisition style. Now they keep the community, the fan base, the long tail, and the passionate founder. He gets to work on it full time and they get rid of other peoples ads.

jacquesm 12y ago
It's not that easy though. Setting precedent for infringement being rewarded with a buy-out might send all the wrong signals. If they did that a few thousand 'hack with Ikea' sites would jump up overnight. The problem with these suits is usually not the specific case at hand but everybody else that will use the opportunity if they no longer defend their trademark vigorously. And buying out a site like that would probably not qualify as defense but as reward. If the price was $0 or the former owner would pay a token fine and the site would then be run by the former owner but under the IKEA umbrella then it might work. But an actual payment for something that leveraged a brand would be a big mistake imo.
- joering2 12y ago
  > Setting precedent for infringement being rewarded with a buy-out might send all the wrong signals. Just exactly what wrong signals did Google send when they bough Youtube? Unless we are blind and skip the fact youtube willingfully hosted 90% of ifringe content.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    The analogy would be that google bought googletube, which they did not.
- nasmorn 12y ago
  They don't infringe on anything IMHO. This is a fan site promoting the use of the companies products. This is not the same as using the tm to sell look alikes. If sites adding massive value to a brand over almost a decade can expect to be noticed and acquired how is that bad for ikea.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
Agree with this as well. This type of community is a gold mine for Ikea and is not something a marketing department can whip up overnight. I am sure Ikea could have lowballed the site owner and he'd still be happy. Right now the majority of the OBL's on the site are to what appears to be his Amazon store: http://i.imgur.com/PKrZAyR.png http://i.imgur.com/PKrZAyR.png Ikea could redirect all 18,000 of those links to Ikea.com product pages instead of his personal amazon store. In addition that type of community that the webmaster built is gold! 100s of thousands of comments, a huge Facebook Page, a very well done Pinterest page along with other social media accounts all for the taking.

jacquesm 12y ago

It's not that easy though. Setting precedent for infringement being rewarded with a buy-out might send all the wrong signals. If they did that a few thousand 'hack with Ikea' sites would jump up overnight. The problem with these suits is usually not the specific case at hand but everybody else that will use the opportunity if they no longer defend their trademark vigorously. And buying out a site like that would probably not qualify as defense but as reward. If the price was $0 or the former owner would pay a token fine and the site would then be run by the former owner but under the IKEA umbrella then it might work. But an actual payment for something that leveraged a brand would be a big mistake imo.

joering2 12y ago
> Setting precedent for infringement being rewarded with a buy-out might send all the wrong signals. Just exactly what wrong signals did Google send when they bough Youtube? Unless we are blind and skip the fact youtube willingfully hosted 90% of ifringe content.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The analogy would be that google bought googletube, which they did not.
nasmorn 12y ago
They don't infringe on anything IMHO. This is a fan site promoting the use of the companies products. This is not the same as using the tm to sell look alikes. If sites adding massive value to a brand over almost a decade can expect to be noticed and acquired how is that bad for ikea.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

Agree with this as well. This type of community is a gold mine for Ikea and is not something a marketing department can whip up overnight. I am sure Ikea could have lowballed the site owner and he'd still be happy. Right now the majority of the OBL's on the site are to what appears to be his Amazon store: http://i.imgur.com/PKrZAyR.png http://i.imgur.com/PKrZAyR.png Ikea could redirect all 18,000 of those links to Ikea.com product pages instead of his personal amazon store. In addition that type of community that the webmaster built is gold! 100s of thousands of comments, a huge Facebook Page, a very well done Pinterest page along with other social media accounts all for the taking.