Keyword Purchases Not a Trademark Use–Merck v. Mediplan Health Consulting
By Eric Goldman Merck & Co. v. Mediplan Health Consulting, 2006 WL 800756 (SDNY Mar. 30, 2006) About a week after Edina Realty v. TheMLSonline allowed a keyword purchase of a competitor’s trademark to go to trial, we got another…
Search Engine Bias Article
By Eric Goldman Search engines ranking algorithms create winners and losers, and some people don’t like this system. Obviously the losers don’t like it (see the KinderStart v. Google lawsuit as an example). More importantly, commentators with normative views about…
Competitor’s Keyword Ad Purchase May Be Trademark Infringement–Edina Realty v. TheMLSonline
By Eric Goldman Edina Realty, Inc. v. TheMLSonline.com, 2006 WL 737064 (D. Minn. Mar. 20, 2006) There have been many lawsuits involving keyword advertising, but in most of the reported decisions, the search engines were the defendants. There have been…
Animal-Related Patent Trends
By Eric Goldman Wired runs an article on Patently Silly, one of the blogs tracking goofy patents. The article notes the implicit contradiction in the trends for patenting pet pampering products and patenting new and more effective ways of producing…
Yahoo Loses 230 Defense for its Dating Site–Anthony v. Yahoo
By Eric Goldman Anthony v. Yahoo! Inc., 2006 WL 708572 (N.D. Cal. March 17, 2006) Anthony subscribed to Yahoo’s dating subscription services. He claims that Yahoo creates false personal profiles and retains expired profiles to make the subscription service look…
NY Enforcement Actions for Reselling Emails in Breach of Privacy Policy
By Eric Goldman Gratis Internet runs several websites that promise free stuff (like free iPods) in exchange for consumers signing up for subscription trials. The trials are initially free but then convert to paid subscriptions. The idea is that many…
CDT Report on Adware Advertising
By Eric Goldman The Center for Democracy and Technology has released “Following the Money: How Advertising Dollars Encourage Nuisance and Harmful Adware and What Can be Done to Reverse the Trend.” The report details the complex web of relationships between…
Google Sued Over Rankings–KinderStart.com v. Google
By Eric Goldman KinderStart.com LLC v. Google, Inc., No. C 06-2057 RS (N.D. Cal. complaint filed March 17, 2006) Google has been sued for downgrading the PageRank of websites in contravention of its stated “objective” policies. In KinderStart’s case, they…
Do-Not-Contact Registries Proliferating?
By Eric Goldman There has been a groundswell of action at the state level to implement do-not-contact registries of various kinds. Two of particular note: 1) Don’t-spam-my-kid Registries. Two states (Utah and Michigan) already have laws enabling do-not-spam registries for…
FTC Extends COPPA Without Changes…and New FTC RSS Feeds
By Eric Goldman The FTC has extended the COPPA rule unchanged. Most significantly, the rule continues to preclude non-authenticated email as a way of obtaining parental consent. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about COPPA much any more….