Digital Equipment Corp is facing another lawsuit over its AltaVista brand name. This time its from, predictably enough, a company called Alta Vista Corp Ltd, a British-based media company with an increasing presence in the US. It claims the use of the name by DEC is infringing its patent rights in the US. It is seeking an injunction in courts in Washington DC. DEC licensed purchased the trademark in 1996 and then licensed it to Altavista Technology Inc (ATI), which then proceeded to change its web site to mimic DEC’s AltaVista web site and then began to exploit the similarity by selling advertising on it. DEC won an injunction against the company in March 1997 that required ATI to display a disclaimer and provides a link to DEC (CI No 3,123). We can’t see this latest case getting very far, especially given DEC’s increased access to highly-paid lawyers as it gets subsumed into Compaq Computer Corp. Ironically, if a comprehensive search engine such as AltaVista was available in 1995 when DEC came up with the name, it would not have got into such tangles, a fact that, no doubt, is not lost on DEC.
