News from Trade Buzzer and "Geek Nerd"

It's been a long time since we told you about the legal dispute surrounding the "Geek Nerd" brand, so here's an update at last. If you don't know what it's all about, you can find a brief summary of the issue at the beginning of our last article on the topic. Since the mills of the law grind slowly, not too much has actually happened in the whole period from September last year until now. We had won the court case in the second instance and Trade Buzzer could only have gone to the BGH, but that was probably too expensive for them (the lawyer Mr. Schröder would then no longer have been allowed to represent them, which is of course also rather stupid). So we won all along the line! However, the case cost us a lot of money. Not only did we have to pay our own lawyer through two court proceedings, we also had to pay all the court fees. Actually, the plaintiff has to pay these in advance, but we lost the first instance, which is why the costs for the first proceedings were imposed on us.

As we then lodged an appeal, we also had to pay the court costs in the second instance. Pretty unfair, but unfortunately the alternative would have been to give up in the middle :( In total, we're talking about over 14,000 EUR! But now that we've won at the very end, we'll actually get the money back from Trade Buzzer. Theoretically at least. In practice, Trade Buzzer has filed for insolvency and declared at the residents' registration office that it no longer lives in Berlin but now in Poland. The insolvency application has so far been rejected by the Berlin district court as inadmissible because they have not submitted a complete application, but in the end, unfortunately, that doesn't help us much either: the company probably no longer has any money and the managing director cannot be found. We are now trying to enforce our claim against the managing director personally, which will of course cost us more money, time and nerves. However, if we succeed, the advantage is that even if Trade Buzzer becomes insolvent, this will not affect our claim and we can try to get our money for 30 years. Of course, we will do this and there are a number of ways to do this: For example, you can find out who a debtor works for, whether they have a car registered to them or whether they have accounts somewhere. And of course we will do all of this regularly for 30 years :) Nevertheless, the bottom line is that defending yourself against such a warning letter costs a lot of money and is actually almost impossible for a private individual or a small eBay store :(

Those of you who sell T-shirts yourselves or use the Trade Buzzer brands ("Geek Nerd", "Gamer", "Sheldon Cooper", "Barney Stinson" and "Walter White") in other ways will certainly be interested to know what the whole thing means for you now: Of course Trade Buzzer still formally exists and therefore it cannot be ruled out 100% that there will be another attempt to use the brands for warning letters. However, Trade Buzzer lost against us in the last instance and it is therefore pretty clear that the whole idea has failed. Trying to do something similar again now is likely to be much more difficult, as you can now simply refer to the judgment we won. It should also not be forgotten that Trade Buzzer will have to pay a lot of money for lost court cases if they try again. There is no way they will risk that. So in practice, we think we can assume that the terms can be used again! It is somewhat more difficult for those of you who have issued a cease-and-desist declaration. A breach of the cease-and-desist declaration always results in a contractual penalty, regardless of whether the trademark has been infringed. So there could be some quick money to be made here for Trade Buzzer. It is unlikely that Trade Buzzer will become active again, because they would have to use all of their income to pay their debts. But of course you can't rule it out.