Trademark Enforcement
Trademark Enforcement is a constant battle. The internet is full of people both ignorant of the law or who feel their are qualified arm-chair lawyers and therefore can interpret the law as they wish. The reality is, in so far as a Guild/Clan/Cabal/etc.. name is concerned, we own the rights to The Syndicate. Our community/guild/organization does business as that name. It is our identity. And as such, it is protected by two Trademarks (one for the name and one for our logo and slogan in conjunction with our name).

Fortunately, most gaming companies such as SOE and Electronic Arts are supporters of our enforcement of our Trademark. In recent months, there has been a proliferation of groups in SWTOR stealing our "The Syndicate" guild name. Fortunately, EA has been great to work with. A process was established whereby we could report sitings of rogue groups and they would handle them.

The process worked SO well in fact, that during on such enforcement effort, both of our own guild entities were renamed! That incident happened in Sept 2012 when many servers were merged into "mega servers" and suddenly there were 6 "The Syndicate" guilds on our server (in addition to our Imperial and our Republic entities). A request was placed to rename those groups. Within a couple of hours, EA was acting on the request and suddenly emails arrived through their Customer Support group very politely informing us that our guild name violated a Trademark and therefore we had to be renamed and to please submit some alternate name choices. We were able to quickly clear that up but it was a great example of EA's willingness to support the mark although it did cause a few tense "ZOMG!" moments as we sorted it all out.