ALLGBMINI

Mark Ferguson (owner of MCOL) has posted an update on the situation with the BMW lawyers:
… We did receive a new letter from BMW’s legal team … they attempted to provide some additional clarification on how they are classifying sites as enthusiast vs. commercial … they indicate that enthusiast sites (eg – clubs) can not have links to commercial sites such as a MINI-focused vendor and be able to have MINI or MINI COOPER in their name. This is still confusing to me in that clubs do not typically have any form of financial benefit for doing so …

So the BMW legal position still appears to be that if I have a link to, for example, the excellent Hot Pocket, then I should not have “mini” in my web domain name! Even though I make no money from that link; and even though MINI USA has no equivalent product so they are not losing any business.

Gabe Bridgers web site has an interesting article about MINI sales, showing sales of more than 100,000 cars so far this year! The USA runs second to the cars homeland in sales, with Germany following (the sales link lists MINI sales in the USA).

I wonder if the MINI legal position will have any effect on US sales during the rest of this year (more than 2000 signature on the petition, Saturday afternoon!). I, and apparently everyone else, got a stock response to a letter sent to MINIUSA:
… we have no wish to prevent independent businesses from trading … MINI USA is duty bound to defend its MINI trademarks …
Here is a significant issue for me; if they claim that “MINI” is their trademark, then “Mini”, “mini”, etc are not; and domain names are case independent!
… we do distinguish between enthusiast and commercial websites. We welcome enthusiast-only websites …
Good – perhaps I am safe with this site!
… we ask that third parties engaged in commercial MINI-related activities make clear that they are not officially licensed, and limit themselves to “fair use” textural references to MINI in their literature … a commercial website may not use MINI in its domain name or tradename, nor may it make trademark use of the MINI mark …
As I said above, I think they will have difficulty claiming that a domain name with the letters “m”, “i”, “n”, “i” in sequence is an infringement of their trademark. I do understand that putting their logo on a site would create difficulties …

I don’t see this issue going away quickly. There will be a lot of disappointed people if northamericanmotoring is forced to disappear!