Film Fest Warns: Don't Call It 'Tribeca'

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED FEB. 2, 2007

The Tribeca Film Festival—and its affiliated Tribeca Film Center and Tribeca Enterprises—filed suit against a local group that shares a piece of its moniker.

Lawyers for the Festival,  founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, claim that Tribeca Network, an online entertainment Web site run by Chuck Harris, is guilty of trademark infringement. In other words, for using the word “Tribeca.”

At issue is Harris’s sprawling Web site, Tribeca Network (tribeca.net), an online venue for artists, filmmakers, writers, aspiring radio personalities and even self-help gurus that operates something like YouTube. Just before Christmas, Harris received a warning from a Festival lawyer.

The letter instructed Harris, a 35-year resident of the neighborhood, to cease using “Tribeca” in his Web site name, turn over all domain names that included “Tribeca,” and provide an accounting of all site revenues. Harris refused to respond.  Then, on Jan. 30, Harris received a  summons from the law firm Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein, and Selz, with an exhaustive list of claims against him, including unfair competition, “cybersquatting,” and trademark infringement.

The Festival is seeking an injunction to prevent Harris from “using any mark confusingly similar to Tribeca Marks in connection with any entertainment-related services...” It claims his site could could be confused with 10 such “Tribeca Marks,” including ‘Tribeca Entertainment,’ ‘Tribeca Productions,’ and the film festival.

Harris, a former owner of several local bars and buildings, formed Tribeca Network in the summer of 2006. But he says he bought the domain name “tribeca.net” in 1995. “We’ve run a variety of different things out of there,” he said. “I did some real estate business.”

The suit points out that while Harris may have owned the domain name since before the Festival existed, the site was only recently put into use for entertainment purposes “to seize upon the public’s familiarity with the TRIBECA Marks in order to promote their own short film competition...”

The Tribeca Shorts Film Festival is an arm of tribeca.net. It went live in November and about 35 people have sent in entries so far. Visitors to the site judge the contest, which is exclusively online. “It would be hard to imagine that anyone on our site would think of themselves as being related to the Tribeca Film Festival,” Harris said. “The people making their little two-minute videos showing how they cook pasta would hardly fit in at Sundance.” Harris said his site, which brings in no revenue, has about 1,700 registered users. Some 400 of them have their own shows, from “The Almost Daily Electronic Meditation” to footage of accordion performances to “The Mr. Cutlets Show” a guide to Manhattan meat. Tammie Rosen, a spokeswoman for the Tribeca Film Festival, fears that people will be misled. “We feel that they’re launching properties, such as the Tribeca Shorts Film Festival, creates confusion with the public,” said Rosen, adding that the Tribeca Film Festival supports other film festivals Downtown. She declined to comment further on the case. Harris said he would have been willing to compromise if the Festival had approached him amiably. But as it is he’s not backing down. “They think they really own the name ‘Tribeca,’” said Harris. “I will use what limited resources I have so they never get that name.” This isn’t the first time that the expanding Tribeca Film Festival, a multi-million dollar enterprise now with venues on the Upper West Side, Midtown, and the East Village, has flexed its muscles over naming rights. Last April, Laurence Asseraf, director of what was then known as the Tribeca Underground Film Festival, also received a cease-and-desist letter. At first, she resisted. “I said, ‘I’m like a mosquito compared to a dinosaur’,” she said. “How can a mosquito hurt a dinosaur?” Asseraf’s annual festival began in her former art gallery on Duane Street in 2004. It is five days long, and screenings, she said, draw 100 people at most.

Upon receiving the letter, Asseraf posted a disclaimer on her Web site saying her festival was not affiliated with the Tribeca Film Festival.

But when Festival organizers continued to threaten suit, she backed down. Her group is now called Be Film: The Underground Festival.

“It’s wrong that I had to go through that,” she said. “When I opened my film festival, I was trying to participate in the revival of the neighborhood.”

Harris also emphasizes that his goals are grassroots. In a rebuttal letter posted to tribeca.net, he wrote, “We are not here for the Spielbergs and the De Niros.”

A visit to Tribeca Network’s Web site makes that clear, as does a trip to their loft headquarters at 38 Lispenard St. On a recent afternoon, several volunteers clicked away on keyboards, while another broadcast an online “news, views and blues” radio show through a headset. An old dog hobbled from cubicle to cubicle, visiting.

Harris beamed. “We used to run this out of my apartment,” he said.

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