A Legal Battle Over The Trademark Ownership
Novosoft LLC was partnering with Novosoft Inc in the field of software development for over ten years. In 2003 due to a financial markets storm caused by a Dot-com bubble crash, the companies decided to make their businesses independently and divide the software products they created together. On May 29, 2003 the copyright of Handy Backup was transferred to Novosoft LLC.
During the reorganization, a group of people from the Russian branch of Novosoft Inc accused Novosoft LLC of stealing the trademark and refused to transfer ownership of the Handy Backup web site. They filed a suit against Novosoft LLC claiming that the copyright had been transferred illegally, and continued selling the program, acting under the old name of Novosoft Inc (which in fact stopped its existence as a US-based company).
Since then, both parties have fought in a continuous legal battle which is still not over. At present, there are two websites, http://www.handybackup.net belonging to Novosoft LLC and http://www.handybackup.com belonging to Novosoft Inc, selling different versions of Handy Backup under the same name.
While Novosoft LLC seems to put many efforts into development and promotion of the program, Novosoft Inc succeeds in selling a 5-year obsolete version of the program, due to initial high rankings in Internet search engines (in a "classical" dot-com way). This creates a lot of confusion among both customers and editors: e.g., in 2008 TopTenReviews published a review of Novosoft Inc's version of Handy Backup, mistakenly ascribing it to Novosoft LLC.
In May 2008, the Texas District Court acknowledged that the Handy Backup copyright had been transferred to Novosoft LLC legally and dismissed the case. Immediately after that Novosoft LLC filed a suit demanding that Novosoft Inc transfer the domain name to them.
EDIT: 30th September 2012. The fake website handybackup.com is still online. However, there is an inaccuracy in the article. The Novosoft LLC and handbackup.net is owned by the Russian company and it is the Russian company hence that is the legal owner. It is the American company that is the Novosoft Inc branch and it is the American company that owns the handybackup.com website. As such when purchasing the legitimate product one needs to ensure that one is buying the Russian version not the American version.
Read more about this topic: Handy Backup
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