NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Question of ethics...
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Question of ethics...
Cliff Kurtzman (cliff_at_tenagra.com)
Fri, 8 Aug 1997 15:00:50 -0600
Gray Charles <grayc_at_konza.flinthills.com> wrote:
>I was just told by my upline in a multi-level
>marketing company that I should use META tags to increase traffic to
>my webpage. He said that I should use keywords and that those keywords
>should include the names of other MLM companies.
It is not only unethical but could well create trademark infringement and a
potential law suit if you use a trademark of your competitor, even if
"hidden" in a META tag, in such a way as to deliberately cause confusion
and misdirection to someone using a search engine. I'm not a lawyer and
doubt there is any case law yet as applied to this specific circumstance,
but you probably would not want to spend the money to defend yourself if
someone tries to make a test case out of you.
We also have experience where a competitor of one of our clients bought one
of our client's product names as a search term on some of the search
engines, which I understand to be a fairly common practice. The competitor
did this so they could serve up a banner for their competitive product when
someone tried to do a search on our clients' product name. Those search
engines that even have a policy regarding this practice said that what they
would do for any trademarked term is offer to take it away from the
competitor if and only if our client would agree to buy it. I won't be too
surprised if someday someone files suit against one of the search engines
for deliberately using their trademark in such a manner as to cause
confusion.
--Cliff Kurtzman
The Tenagra Corporation
http://www.tenagra.com/
281/480-6300
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