A serious question-- why didn't EPI sue the Employment Policies Institute for trademark infringement since their acronym was so obviously designed to create confusion. Did your lawyers come to the conclusion that short organization acronyms are hard to protect?
The reason I ask is a small non-profit in Nevada-- with the acronym PLAN -- just send us a cease and desist order telling us to drop all use of our name within the next week or face a lawsuit. The law seems to be ambiguous on all this, so I'm curious what the thinking at EPI was -- or maybe they didn't even think of the legal angle at the time?
Any help would be appreciated in thinking about how to respond to these folks in Nevada. They're decent folks, so we'd like to figure out some compromise, but the raw fact is almost any combination of words that we want to use lands us with a similar acronym to some other non-profits, so we don't want to be nice, back off, and get sued by someone else. So we're just trying to figure out what other peoples' experience on these issues have been.
Thanks,
Nathan