FTD v. Originals Florist & Gifts

Citation: FTD v. Originals Florist & Gifts, Inc., 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16869 (N.D. Ill. Nov. 8, 2000).

Factual Background
Plaintiff, the well-known flower-by-wire service that operated under the mark FTD, sought to preliminarily enjoin a licensee who continued to use the FTD marks after its license was suspended.

Trial Court Proceedings
The court granted plaintiff's motion on its claim of trademark infringement, finding that a likelihood of confusion existed as a matter of law when a licensee continued to use the licensed marks after termination of the license. The court ordered defendant to remove all of plaintiff's trademarks from its website and to remove any references to FTD from its metatags.

Plaintiff also asked the court to order defendant to disable its entire website on the theory that search-engine indexes may not be updated to reflect the removal of the FTD marks from defendant's website so that consumers searching for FTD may still be directed to defendant's site. The court refused, however, to order the defendant to shut down its website, because such a remedy was "too extreme."

This page uses content from Finnegan’s Internet Trademark Case Summaries. This entry is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 (Unported) (CC-BY-SA).