Moz should quit fvcking around with lawyers and filings and trademarks and whatever legal bullshit and just focus on innovating and being better at what they do.
I can easily imagine how someone, not familiar with either company, might hear of Moz and, later, mistakenly believe that the company they heard about was Doz (or vice versa).
Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it. So although the case that Moz and Doz are similar isn't particularly strong, it seems close enough that I'm not surprised Moz is taking this action.
Only in that they both end with "oz" and sound nothing alike, don't share any common meaning, and have no other obvious connection. Personally, I don't see how anybody could ever confuse those two words.
Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it.
"any" risk? OK, great, there is a slight, however improbable, risk that somebody could confuse "Fogbeam" and "Moz". After all, we both do something related to computers and both words do contain an "o". So maybe Moz should attack us next?
Right, because everybody has perfect memory of everything they've heard in the past. No wait, it's actually quite the opposite. People have crappy memory, especially for things they're not already familiar with. Neither word has any meaning to an English speaker, but they sounds very similar. I can easily imagine how someone might get confused.
If someone else launched a company "Fogdeam", which sold similar software to yours, surely you'd go after them.
I don't know for sure that we would. But I'd argue that, being a longer word, you get more confusion with the one character change, since any one character changes a smaller percentage of the overall word.
The position of the character definitely matters to. For example, in your "fogdeam" case, I'd say it's iffy. But if somebody launched Dogbeam, I doubt the thought of going after them would even enter my mind. This is all, of course, assuming that they didn't also use a similar logo and similar messaging, etc.
Maybe the "Moz" / "Doz" one is a little bit more of a grey area than I see it, I don't know... I'm biased towards a certain mindset here.
While SeoMoz was promoting Marketing Analytics on this domain name there was nothing about moving all of their services to it. It seems to me that Doz has a reasonable chance (25% maybe) against the giant Moz. I would fight it! There is no way the DOZ guy could predict a domain name shift for Seomoz.com. I visit Woz.com occasionally to see what Woz is up to. I rarely search DMoz.com anymore. I would fight the Moz trademark if there is one... it is too common.
Is moz a person (Woz), a Browser?, a Metal Laminates and Architectural Products company, do they sell MOZ Luxury Wheels?, a songwriter? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Moz, finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MOZ.TO, do they sell sweaters? viva-moz.com, is it a cafe? moz-cafe, another person Middelton-Moz Institute?, does it have to do with orphans? projectmoz.com. That is just 2 pages on Google.
1. Capseo bought DOZ.com back in April 2011 and Capseo has been selling Online Marketing since September 2009. So it was just a matter of time that we launch DOZ.com.
2. We didn’t fill in December 2012 as you said, but March 12, 2012. (cf. USPTO)
3. DOZ is not an inbound marketing software
Mozilla uses "moz": -moz-box-sizing, -moz-zoom-in, -moz-appearance
Would this be ok too? IE, IE Analytics
> I understand why you're upset. This is not the kind of thing you want to worry about. You want to be building product and getting customers. Not disagreeing about trademark law. I'm very sorry that we're in this situation.
Isn't it ironic?