Hi,
I am not sure that I am writing in the right section of the Forum. I hope you can shed some light on the matter...

Our website that was hosted on Yahoo being taken off-line yesterday.
We got an email last week that a competitor filed a complaint that is saying we are using one of his pictures on our website. that was a mistake and we corrected this whiting the 24 hour time frame we had from Yahoo.
Yesterday morning our website went off-line!
No contact from yahoo, we just got an email saying that they took the site off-line because trademark violation. If we want to resolve the issue we should contact the Company who filed the complaint.
Is this something that can happen ?!

I would think that as Yahoo customers we should at least get a phone call, email something to allow us to defend ourselves.

we got a hold of Yahoo customer support and all we got is a email address and a phone number.
They are saying that they have no access to the case since it is a trademark department and we need to send an email or call and leave a message, we will get a response in a week !!!

A week for us is a huge loss and even then I am not sure how long should it take to resolve the matter.


Any suggestions please ?
how can they do something like this legally?
I would compare it to a customer filing a complain against a store in the mall and instead of letting the store reply and resolve the mall would come and look the store doors the next day.....

Yahoo are being cautious.

Being a provider of a service, if they *know* about copyright infringement, they can be sued for allowing it to continue.

If they can proove that as soon as it was brought to their attention they acted upon it, then they should be fine.

Have a read of...
http://www.out-law.com/page-488

If you are the legit owner of a trademark, you should be able to proove it easily enough.

I can prove easily my case in this matter but I don't have a way to contact Yahoo.
I am getting no response from them.

By email: http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/copyright/general.html
By fax: 020 7131 1015
By mail: Legal Department, Copyright/IP agent, Yahoo!, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8AD

above is from http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/copyright.html

You tried head office's number ;)...
Tel +44 (0) 20 7131 1000
Fax +44 (0) 20 7131 1001
Yahoo! UK Ltd's UK VAT registration number is GB892211528.

Thanks A lot for all the info but our website is in the USA, we tried contacting the office here in CA.

Now we got to the point when we can at least pull off the Domain and we are going forward with that.
We are not going to host again with a company that size...
we have the same problems working with Amazon, Contact with them is just impossible...


We are going to host now on Go Daddy and build a website that is customer and not based on the Yahoo platform.

Was it a trademark (like McDonalds) or a copyright complaint (like using someones image)? It might seem heavy handed, but under the safe harbor provision of the DMCA they have to take it down if someone sends them a signed affidavit in a complaint like this.
Really the only thing to do is send in proof the violation is gone and wait. What alarms me is there was no process like a warning to remove it or dispute their claim. There's something to be said for smaller companies than these mega corporations when it comes to getting a response. I wish you luck.

Was it a trademark (like McDonalds) or a copyright complaint (like using someones image)? It might seem heavy handed, but under the safe harbor provision of the DMCA they have to take it down if someone sends them a signed affidavit in a complaint like this.
Really the only thing to do is send in proof the violation is gone and wait. What alarms me is there was no process like a warning to remove it or dispute their claim. There's something to be said for smaller companies than these mega corporations when it comes to getting a response. I wish you luck.


It was a simple matter of a single picture, it was customized but was originally taken from the competition website.

I don't care about the website owner, he is doing his job.
Yahoo was suppose to protect us, we are their customer and the minimum I would expect is an email, phone call, something...
this is not a small website, its a business.