Porn company WREAL, which owns the copyright to FyreTV, is suing Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) for copyright infringement for its own streaming service Fire TV. WREAL is seeking all Fire TV profits to date and for Amazon to change the name of its service to something else, reports Chris Morris for CNBC, claiming that it hurts their ability to expand into mainstream offerings in the future.
(n.b. none of the websites mentioned in this article are safe for work)
How did Amazon miss this?
“The linking of Amazon’s house mark with the ‘Fire TV’ name is an aggravation of the likelihood of confusion, increasing the possibility that WREAL’ s product could be seen as an imitator,” WREAL said in its complaint. “WREAL was the first (by many years) to use the trademarks FyreTV and FyreTV.com in connection with its dedicated STB and streaming on-demand content over the internet.”
The company also points out that it owns firetv.com, which redirects to FyreTV, because it knew that customers would misspell the service’s name. Probably the most surprising part of this whole story is that no one at Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) had the same thought. Right now, if someone goes to firetv.com to sign-up for Amazon’s streaming television, they are going to be greeted with hardcore pornography – probably not the marketing campaign that Bezos had in mind.
WREAL probably looking for a settlement
Before announcing the lawsuit, it seems that WREAL hadn’t made any corporate announcements in years and was thought to be more or less defunct by the rest of the porn industry. Even so, it’s hard to argue that there is no chance of confusion between two video streaming services whose names differ by one letter and are spoken exactly the same way. That Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is getting sued by an online porn shop is funny, but the suit sounds like it has merit.
Aside from finding out who didn’t do their due diligence, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) must be wondering how much it will cost to simply buy the FyreTV name and shut it down, settling the matter without going through the courts. If it’s true that WREAL was going out of business, this could easily be the owners’ lucky way of cashing out. And even if it’s not, there’s no way that FyreTV ever had the potential of FireTV. The only question is, what price does Amazon put on not being confused for pornographers?
