Outdoor apparel and sporting goods cataloger L.L. Bean on May 17 filed complaints in Maine District Court against four “sample” companies—including Nordstrom and J.C. Penney—which Bean alleges are using pop-up ads on Bean’s Website. In addition to the two cataloger-retailers, Bean also named coffee marketer Gevalia and diet creator/marketer Atkins in four suits.
“These companies are a representative sampling of both competing and non-competing companies that have chosen to embrace the practice of unfairly trading on L.L. Bean’s name,” says Bean spokesperson Rich Donaldson. “With these four we hope to present this matter to the courts in a way that will shed more light on relevant trademark issues. We will continue to monitor and review similar practices on an ongoing basis.”
In using the four high-profile companies to set precedence, Bean’s long term objective is to get all advertisers to stop using pop-up ads on the cataloger’s site. “We would prefer to resolve this matter without extensive and expensive litigation,” Donaldson says. “If the advertisers choose instead to litigate, we are certainly prepared to defend our name.”
In a statement, Bean president/CEO Chris McCormick said that pop-up ads “are not only a source of interference and irritation to consumers trying to navigate the web, but they also cross the line of fair business practices by infringing upon the L.L. Bean trademark.”
In the suits, Bean details the methods each company uses. In all four of the suits, Bean points out that the four companies targeted use “spyware” software developed by Claria (formerly Gator) that plants itself on indivduals’ computers and tracks their online activity. Bean isn’t targeting Claria, per se, in its actions, however. In complaining that its customers find find pop-up ads “objectionable,” Bean adds in a statement that “a strong majority of users are unaware that the pop-up generating software resides on their computers by way of utilities or other software that they have downloaded onto their machines.”