“They are reportedly spending $300m on this campaign – I am sure for that money – if they want to – they can come up with something original which is not virtually the same as, and infringing the rights of, a small direct competitor.”

I wrote that response quickly and did not mean to use the word “copy” because while this is all very suspicious (and even the slightest research by MS would have found our existing use of the tagline “NO WALLS”), I cannot be certain that they actually copied it.

Zvi
http://G.ho.st

Microsoft’s response is nonsense:

“We are not aware that Ghost has any trademark registrations or other rights that would be infringed by our ‘Life Without Walls’ campaign. To our knowledge, the right they have asserted, namely, a U.S. ‘registered trademark application,’ in the phrase ‘No Walls,’ does not exist.”

They know this is nonsense – we have rights in law by virtue of using the trademark NO WALLS as a prominent tag line (with the TM marking) for 17 months and we do now have a pending registration.

“Even if they did, they cannot prevent others from using the words ‘no walls’ together in a sentence or in a descriptive manner in ad copy.”

Microsoft are not using ‘no walls’ in a sentence. It is a prominent marketing headline on the Windows operating system home page.

“The tagline for Microsoft’s new ad campaign is ‘Life Without Walls’–a slogan that, taken in its entirety, is not confusingly similar to Ghost’s purported ‘motto.’”

Clearly ‘life without walls’ and ‘no walls’ capture the very same concept and are confusing. Additionally Microsoft are using the phrase ‘life without walls’ simultaneously to and related to actually using our exact tag line ‘no walls’ (with the word imagine added in small print) causing further confusion. By using these two phrases together they are confirming that these phrases are extremely closely related.

They are reportedly spending $300m on this campaign – I am sure for that money – if they wanted to – they could come up with something original which is not copied from and infringing the rights of a small direct competitor.