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HTC wrestles with smutty outfit rival over new handset

Vivid tries to heave Asian opponent into legal Jell-O

A porn company has filed a cease-and-desist letter to phone-makers HTC, demanding that they change the name of their new smartphone, the HTC Vivid, by Monday.

Vivid Entertainment, the LA based video-porn house famous for its celebrity sex tapes mostly recently staring Kim Kardashian, claimed in the letter that the Vivid handset would infringe on their "Vivid" brand.

A spokesperson for Vivid Entertainment confirmed the details of the letter to us over the phone, saying that all the details aired on gossip blog TMZ were true.

"All the details on TMZ are true" she said "we're uploading the letter to the web shortly".

The letter asks HTC to withdraw the name of the phone by Monday, or the pornographers will take out a court case.

HTC confirmed receipt of the letter and told us:

"We are reviewing the complaint and don't expect to have any further comment until it is resolved."

HTC's Vivid phone is one of their first LTE-enabled handsets and became available in shops on 6th November.

Vivid the porn company is the top Google result for the word, but we notice they have chosen not to sue various other organisations laying claim to "vivid": for example VIVID - a contemporary art organisation based in Birmingham, UK; Vivid Sydney, a light and music festival in Sydney Australia; and Vivid Audio, a maker of high-end designer audio equipment.

Vivid Entertainment have a knack for draw attention to themselves; CEO Steven Hirsch made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic by offering Pippa Middleton $5m (£3m) to appear in one of his adult films

More like "we have chosen to file a not-a-hope-in-hell cease-and-desist letter in order to get a bit of publicity for our site."

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My thoughts exactly

The case should be thrown out, and they should be charged costs, and possibly fined for vexatious litigation or something. Lets see how they like their free publicity then.

As far as I can tell, the smartphone market, and the pr0n vid market are two quite separate market areas.

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if they're a porn house, then they already have lots of column inches... unless they're a strictly girl-girl porn house.

Paris for fairly obvious reasons.

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Maybe those Vivid guys spend too much time with their heads up some girl's behind to understand copyright all that well?

Vivid being a dictionary word, HTC would actually have to duplicate Vivid's logo to be infringing on their design, since dictionary words can't be owned or protected.

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P--U--B--L--I--C--I--T--Y... It's all about getting their company's name in print, along with mentioning what they do...

That's why movies stars have press agents ... to keep their name in the news. Doesn't matter what is said about them as long as their name is in the news, and is spelled correctly.

It's BEER O'Clock somewhere on this planet.

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