CME sues globexfx.com for trademark infringement

It seems that everybody is suing everybody these days and just about for anything.

A few days ago Broadband Graphics LLC sued CMS Forex claiming that CMS’s VT Trader 2.0 software infringes a pair of patents for technology that automatically resizes images to fit into an end-user’s device. It seems that Broadband is in the business of suing many companies for similar alleged infringements as I found at least three more such lawsuits filed by this company here, here and here.

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Now we have Chicago Mercantile Exchange Corp (CME) suing a small Canadian FX broker for trademark infringement and for cyber squatting.

Futures and options exchange operator CME, a unit of Chicago’s CME Group Inc., filed its lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against Global Foreign Exchange Corp. of Edmonton, Alberta. CME’s suit accuses Global Foreign Exchange, which also goes by Globex FX, of trademark infringement, trademark counterfeiting, trademark dilution, cybersquatting, unfair competition and deceptive trade practices. At issue is the trademark for CME’s Globex electronic trading system, which it launched in 1992. Globex FX “intentionally uses CME’s Globex trademark without authorization” on its Web site, according to the suit. In addition, CME claims that Globex FX’s domain name is too similar to its own and, when Globex FX registered www.globexfx.com in September 2004 and later other similar URLs, it was doing so in “bad faith.”

Personally I think this is an unnecessary legal battle as I couldn’t find any similar trademark on globexfx.com’s website to that of CME’s, nor do I think any client can confuse CME’s Globex platform http://www.cmegroup.com/globex/ (which doesn’t even offer forex rather futures and options) with globexfx.com which is esentially a forex broker mainly dealing with international currency transactions. My guess is that the people behind globexfx.com just thought that globex was a nice Portmanteau of the words globe and forex.