Can gaming company Zynga successfully obtain trademark rights to all things ending in ville, the French word for a town or village?
Answering that question is a task facing two federal courts.
Before it launched its billion dollar IPO, the San Francisco-based tech company threatened to sue computer game makers for having product names containing the ‘ville’ suffix.
Rather than accede to Zynga’s demands, game makers in West Virginia and Texas preemptively sued Zynga for court declarations that their game names — Blingville and Dungeonville — do not infringe any of the company’s trademark rights.
A federal indictment unsealed today alleges that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a Connecticut resident who “was affiliated with Anonymous” brought down KISS band member Gene Simmons’ web site last year.
The felony charges allege that Poe and other unnamed co-conspirators used an open source software program to send large amounts of packets and requests to overwhelm GeneSimmons.com servers and bring the musician’s e-commerce site down.
But why did the attacks target the outspoken KISS co-founder?
Record label UMG Recordings, Inc. sued Escape Media Group, Inc., the owner of online music streaming website Grooveshark, five of the company’s executives, and two other employees for alleged copyright infringement.
UMG’s newest lawsuit contains purported email exchanges with company director Sina Simantob alleging, in part, that Escape “bet the company on the fact that it is easier to beg forgiveness than ask [record labels] permission” to use their copyrighted works. (Read the full complaint below).
Can gaming company Zynga successfully obtain trademark rights to all things ending in ville, the French word for a town or village?
Record label UMG Recordings, Inc. 
