Like an image that revolves about a circle once an hour gotta be ~~ritedSorry,
a silly stickmuckers pumping sterile juice into the deny files that you can Just say
Yeah, I’m all out for content on my fav=
No I am beyond angry so stopping
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Language!
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I expressed my frustration in watch faces, see what happens upon wake…:
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Over here in the UK we have Microsoft Edge and Santander Edge . These are big companys quite happy to share a bit of the Queens / Kings English .
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Oh - I like this watch! 
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I know it is frustrating but companies risk negative consequences if they do not take steps to prevent the use of relevant trademarks - especially if they have been informed of the use and told to cease all future use. In particular, a watch related company cannot use or allow the use of trademarks related to watches without the permission of the trademark owner.
RELIC is a trademark of Fossil Group ( see USPTO search result below ) and it has been registered for use in relation to watches.
Also, standard character format trademarks ( ie. plain text ) are not case sensitive. So all of the following would be covered by the registration:
relic
Relic
rELic
R e l i c
R E L I C
An automatic detection system may not cover all variations but they are covered by the trademark.
Whether or not it is “fair” that normal words and phrases can be protected by trademark laws, the sad fact is they can be and there is nothing we mortals can do about it.
As was said above, the best thing to do is to make a copy of a face before you publish. If you get a rejection you can appeal if the use is merely incidental and completely unrelated to the watch face, an actual watch or a brand and it may be restored. But it might take time, discussions back and forth and the appeal may fail. The easiest thing to do in my opinion is simply to reword the description to remove the offending word.
Here is the link to the USPTO search page if you want to check for trademarks:
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-information
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Thanks for the insight and the link.
Your words support the suggestion for either making list of banned words known beforehand, or for making the check of description compatibility continuous, before it would be allowed for publication, and so to say “enforce” the rewording, to save the mentioned traffic and frustration about false flags.
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Could be good suggestions - certainly it would help the people acting in good faith and getting caught in error.
The problem I guess are those people who intentionally try to game the system by using words and images as close as possible to those owned by the well know brands in order to boost the popularity of their faces. Publishing the current list of trigger words or providing real time feedback on variations would perhaps aid that effort and result in more undetected copyright / trademark breaches and greater effort required to continuously update the database to include more and more variations.
I imagine the aim is to have a system that tries to balance the need to stop breaches, and the related desire to frustrate gaming efforts, whilst minimising the number of innocent mistakes. Not an easy problem I guess and difficult to come up with an optimal solutions that meets all aims.
It would be good though if there were some kind of demerit point system introduced such that users with less than a certain threshold of points in a given period could have their rejected faces immediately returned to draft with an explanation email. And only once a user hits the recidivist threshold are their faces simply deleted. Such a system might alleviate some of the frustration felt by the users trying to follow the rules.
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Thanks for the detailed explanatio, that does help put things into perspective. I wasn’t aware Relic was an actual registered trademark by Fossil Group, so that explains a lot.
I still find it a bit tricky when everyday words are trademarked, but I get that legally there’s not much room for interpretation.
One thing I do feel could be improved is the way Facer handles this. Right now, a watch face gets removed immediately, and while you can appeal, it becomes a slow and clunky process.
Wouldn’t it be more user-friendly to simply flag the word and give the creator a chance to adjust the description before taking it down? That way, it could be re-uploaded within minutes instead of going through a whole back-and-forth.
I’ll definitely take your advice to duplicate faces before publishing and be more careful with descriptions from now on. Appreciate you taking the time to clarify all this!
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Thanks! And good question, in my case it was actually some time after publishing, there was already some people liking the face. That’s what made it even more confusing, because the face was live for a while without issues.
I really like your suggestion about applying the filter at the publishing stage. That would save both users and staff a lot of time and frustration. Just a quick warning before publishing would make all the difference.
And glad you liked the swinging shades idea, Thanks!
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Thanks, will contribute to the list in the future when this will happen again.
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Is this what the Facer bot uses (Marvin) to determine copyrighted text? If so is it updated with new information as words are copyrighted?
If the answer is yes could it be pinned to the top of tfhe forum pages, that way if someone gets a watchface taken down, they could check the list, remove the offending words and republish. The watchface that was raken down could simply be deleted after say 30 days. This would simplify admin and reduce the annoyance of not knowing why a watchface why a face was taken down
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I got zapped for using “navigator” in a description, literally referring to a pilot. As of right now, there are 464 active trademark registrations using that word, 123 pending registrations, and another 1651 registrations that are cancelled or abandoned. So, I don’t agree with how Facer handles these.
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Sorry, I have no information on how Facer comes up with the list of trademarked text. I do doubt though that many companies would employ people to search through government databases to find words to target. If it were me, I would respond to copyright/trademark owner’s requests/demands to take down, and prevent future use of, specific items. But I don’t know if that is what is done in this case.
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A trademark is associated with particular goods and services. One company ( Tissot S.A ) may be able to register “NAVIGATOR” as a trademark associated with “Watches” while another ( Ford Motor Company ) is able to register the same word in relation to “Motor vehicles”. The use by either company of the word is not a breach of the other’s trademark so long as they don’t use it in relation to each other’s registered “Goods or Service” category.
If you limit the search of the USPTO database to “Navigator” and “watch”, there are 21 results and only 4 of those are actually related to watches. Of those 3 are “Dead” ( due to having been abandoned by their owners ), leaving one live registration - the one owned by Tissot.
Having said all that, I suppose it does not really matter how many live registrations there are, anyone who owns a trademark has enforceable rights to protect it - it only takes one.
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I have had Strikes on NAVIGATION and NAVIGATE . Carefully avoiding NAVIGATOR .
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@Facer_Official So how do you know a text is copyright? There must be a word list somewhere that could be shared?
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I’ve put together a small browser-based tool on GitHub that lets you check your Facer description and keywords against a list of words that are known (so far) to trigger removal by Facer:
https://jjune33.github.io/facer-trademark-checker/
You don’t need to install anything, just paste your text and check.
You can also view the full list of currently flagged words via the page.
I originally tried doing ths via the official USPTO trademark API, but the free request limit is quite low and performance wasn’t ideal. That’s why this version uses the manually curated lst based on community experience (see other topic).
If anyone’s interested in helping manage or expand the underlying Google Sheet, feel free to reach out and I’ll send you a link.
Hopefully this can help prevent a few faces from being taken down unnecessarily.
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Hey Well done . WE tried to maintain a list as a WiKi on here as you know . Great to have a text box to check your description. Nice work .
.
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Thanks! Yes, I used the wiki list, really useful and it helped a lot. I just figured it might be handy to have a quick live check before publishing. Glad to hear it’s helpful.
If you’re interested, I can also share the link to the underlying Google Sheet in case you’d like to help manage or expand the list.
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