Another Court in 2d Cir. Says Buying Keyword Ads Isn’t TM Use in Commerce–FragranceNet.com v. FragranceX.com
By Eric Goldman FragranceNet.com, Inc. v. FragranceX.com, Inc., 2007 WL 1821153 (E.D.N.Y. June 12, 2007) This case shows the deepening split between the Second Circuit and other circuits on keyword…
Utah Legislators Realizing They Screwed Up By Banning Keyword Advertising
By Eric Goldman Linda Fantin at the Salt Lake Tribune reports on the meeting between Utah legislators and various technology companies (Google, eBay, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, 1-800 Contacts and Overstock.com)…
Academic Debate over Trademark Use in Commerce
…has been dispositive in several noteworthy defense wins, including the 1-800 Contacts v. WhenU and Rescuecom v. Google cases. Yet, some experts, such as Prof. McCarthy, believe that the prima…
Utah Bans Keyword Advertising [Updated]
…protect a few noisy Utah trademark owners with weak trademarks (such as 1-800 Contacts and Overstock.com) from legitimate competition via adware. In the process, the law took technology out of…
Rescuecom v. Google Appellant Brief
…that decided 1-800 Contacts v. WhenU, which held that an adware vendor (WhenU) wasn’t making a trademark use in commerce by selling trademarked keywords. You can find the appellant’s brief…
Haifa University Search Engine Conference Recap
…trespass to chattels, GEICO, Rescuecom or 1-800 Contacts were mentioned only in passing or not at all. The fact that we could go almost 11 hours without reaching these topics…
Keyword Ads and Metatags Don’t Confuse Consumers–J.G. Wentworth v. Settlement Funding
…behalf the Wells Fargo, U-Haul and 1-800 Contacts adware cases. However, the court is more persuaded by the Buying for the Home argument that triggering ads based on a trademark…
2006 Blog Year-in-Review
by Eric Goldman Most Popular Blog Posts of the Year 1) O’Reilly and the “Web 2.0” Trademark 2) NYT on Fair Use and Documentaries (overflow from Slashdotting of #1) 3)…
Top Cyberlaw Developments of 2006
By Eric Goldman and John Ottaviani [Eric’s Note: I will be in Israel for the rest of the year. So while it’s a little premature to publish an end-of-the-year recap,…
Courts Can’t Figure Out if Buying Keywords Constitutes Trademark Use–Buying for the Home v. Humble Abode
…competitive keyword purchases on its trademarks when it does the same thing itself. (But this seems to happen fairly frequently–for example, it was an embarrassing fact in the 1-800 Contacts…