A couple of weeks ago I talked with Vincent Wright who previously ran the MyPowerLinkedIn forum. He related that after years of evangelizing for LinkedIn he was asked to remove the reference to LinkedIn due to trademark infringement. At that point, I assumed that as a little fish the gotlinkedin.com domain was living on borrowed time.
Thus I bought this domain and begin planning the switch. Last week the email finally arrived asking me to cease and desist using the trademarked LinkedIn in my domain. Now, even though I think there is no possibility anyone would confuse my site with LinkedIn, I understand the reasoning behind LinkedIn enforcement of trademark law.
If they fail to protect their name now, it could be harder to do so in the future. So immediately I stepped up the conversion process. The first thing I did was hit “reply” to the email to inform them that I would do as they asked. Unfortunately the email bounced back, saying there was no such email.
So even though they asked me to respond to the email, I have yet to find a way to communicate my compliance, other than to place a blank page up on gotlinkedin.com to allow folks the opportunity to go to the LinkedIn site or to my blog.
So if you’re wondering why yhe name and domain name has changed, there you go. And with the domain name change, my linkedin book name has be changed as well to “LinkedIn 101“.
