General Discussions

**cuteninz** · 06-28-2007, 09:27 PM

I wanted to get some legal advice ...

I am opening a hotornot.com clone kind of website ..that is a picture rating site ...

now i understand hotornot is trademarked and i wont be using any similar keyword on my sitename

but i do not understand if hotornot idea is patented..they certainly dont say it on their website and a search on patents doesnt show me any such kind of patents...i have emailed hotornot.com to ask but they havent replied to me.

what are you views on this topic ?

**007** · 06-29-2007, 02:24 PM

Don't expect them to give you the go-ahead. After all, by not responding to you they have already managed to postpone the launch of your site.

There are hundreds of "hotornot" type sites out there. Hot or Not did not invent picture rating. They just successfully marketed it and made it popular.

I doubt you will have any problems, but, then again I am not a lawyer so don't take my advice as gold either. To be 100% sure you should check with a lawyer who deals with such topics.

**highanddry** · 06-29-2007, 02:52 PM

Don't use any of their TM's, images, content, layout etc and your good to go. Realize though that people who come to your site and if they see that it offers nothing more than hotornot, will generally use Hotornot because it is wel recognized. Add something to bring people in and you will avoid the copy issue and the "not getting any traffic" issue that may emerge. For instance I do know about HotorNot but I do not know anything about the "hundreds" of other sites that are just like it.

**Vasity** · 06-29-2007, 02:57 PM

I have done a picture rating site before, one that didn't allow google, and one califorina oriented both were not so good, getting repeat traffic to these kind of sites can be hard,unless you have a way to point traffic at your site because then you usually get more then 1 impresson per unqiue.

(I think.)