When imitation isn't a 'sincere' form of flattery !

Some say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but we are really not so sure as a rather odd Australian dilemma has arisen for us over the past year.

 It has come to our attention that a former manager of Survive (Australia), is running a recently formed company established to 'promote' BCM in Australia and New Zealand. Now this would normally be absolutely fine by us as we are probably the strongest advocates for growth in the sector and importantly effective promotion and lobbying for the Continuity Sector, our problem is the choice of name 'Continuity Forum Pty Ltd' and that this is a private Company!

Now, we were pretty surprised to hear about this as the 'real' Continuity Forum has previously worked closely with Survive, but the BC jungle telegraph works pretty quickly these days and when we were told of this a few months ago we thought it was a simple misunderstanding easily put right with a little chat.

However, whilst we were following up how this situation had arisen, we discovered quite the reverse. After speaking and exchanging emails with them it became clear that there was little, other than cynicism, behind the action of this company, even after we stressed our concerns about the choice of name and how in the small, but global Business Continuity community this would cause confusion, especially as our imitator is a private 'For Profit' Company. We were initially told that it was an "oversight", which raised our eyebrows more than a little, as we would suggest that one of the first things to be done when choosing a name for a new company wherever you are in the world would be a domain registry search and, of course, all Continuity Forum names are owned by us!

In addition, even the most basic Google search for ContinuityForum will very quickly direct you to us!

Even though some time has passed no action has been undertaken to correct the "oversight" and the obvious mimicking is just getting worse!

It also appears as though the issue is now too difficult for them to deal with as neither emails or phone calls from us are being responded to! If this situation had occurred in the UK they would be guilty of an offence known as 'passing off' that is more usually associated with the nefarious activities of organised crime and counterfeit goods and we would have by now slapped an appropriate injunction on the use of the name. Compounding the problem (for us) is the reality facing most organisations, especially smaller 'not for profit' ones, that International legal action is very expensive, time consuming and unfortunately carries no certainty of success.

We certainly don't think that we should have to defend our name, using our precious financial resources to argue this case, when there is so much more important work to do promoting and supporting the Business Continuity Community around the world. So, we have decided to 'shine a light' on the issue and instead 'name and shame' this organisation into doing the right thing.

Accordingly, we would like to encourage anyone that comes into contact with this group to ask them the following simple questions on our behalf;

· Why are you passing yourselves off as the Continuity Forum?

· Why did you not think to check something as basic as the company name before commencing operations?

· Why haven't you responded to the request of the real Continuity Forum to change the name to avoid confusion?

I don't know about you, but I would certainly be very suspicious of ANY organisation that conducted itself in this way.  We still hope they will see the light and do the decent thing! But in the meantime please do remember that this company is NOT your Continuity Forum and is not connected with us in any way.

This company is most certainly a 'for profit' business and are NOT engaged in broader industry development work, they are purely out to make money out of you!