NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> WEB-AD'98 COVERAGE: 2/17/98 - TOP TEN MEDIA BUYING
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> WEB-AD'98 COVERAGE: 2/17/98 - TOP TEN MEDIA BUYING
Mark Pruner (markatty_at_ix.netcom.com)
Tue, 17 Feb 1998 12:58:47 -0500
richard_at_tenagra.com wrote:
>
> NUMBER 9
> Don't buy your competitors trademarked product names as
> keywords. Though it sounds clever (and it is), someone will
> eventually get sued over this and you don't want to be the
> test case.
>
> See:
> Trademark Trickery
> Internet Week
> http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19970929S0001
Richard,
I was the website marketing expert in the Insituform v. National
Envirotech case mentioned in the Trademark Trickery article. That case
was the classic meta-tag trademark infringement case. National
Envirotech had put Insituform's name and the name of one of Insituforms
products, Insitupipe, in their meta-tag section. To me, while reasonably
common, this is a clear unfair trademark practice, which violates the
Lanham act and other laws. The judge in this case readily agreed and
Insituform was able to get a permanent injunction against one of their
arch-competitors very quickly.
The practice you describe of buying competitors trademarks as search
engines keywords is a closer question and there are arguments to be made
on both sides. While I think you are right someone will eventually get
sued, it will be interesting to see who wins.
Joshua Paul of Cowan, Liebowitz and Latman, who represented Insituform,
and I are preparing an article on this and related issues.
Three quick asides:
(1) When you are doing market research on your clients, check for
competitors committing trademark abuses. They are fairly easy to pick
up via search engine, then alert your clients to the abuses. Most
clients really appreciate such knowledge and it gets them to pay more
attention to the web if only for defensive purposes.
(2) The press is dying for stories like these. I contacted approx.
8-10 reporters and got 5 stories including the cover of Internet Week
and a full page in Inter_at_ctive Week and Internet Week. (There were two
other cases at the same time, which made it a bigger story.)
(3) If you have a situation like this, make sure that court
orders the
defendants to not only remove the meta-tags, but also to re-submit the
pages at the search engines so their databases are corrected and then
follow-up to make sure. It took Hotbot 3 weeks to get it straight,
meanwhile people were continuing to be misdirected even though the
meta-tags had been corrected.
_______________________________________________
Mark Pruner, Esq. mark_at_webcounsel.com
Web Counsel, LLC 914/251-9300 (voice)
Suite 211 914/251-1273 (fax)
108 Corporate Park Drive http://www.webcounsel.com
White Plains, NY 110604 Website Based Marketing
mark_at_webcounsel.com
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