More Evidence That Competitive Keyword Advertising Benefits Trademark Owners (Forbes Cross-Post)
By Eric Goldman Many trademark owners hate that rivals can bid on Google AdWords ads triggered by their trademarks, a process I call “competitive keyword advertising.” Trademark owners (and many judges) often assume that a Google search on a trademark…
Recap of Stanford E-Commerce Conference Panel on Takedown Notices
By Eric Goldman Last month, I attended Stanford Law School’s annual E-commerce Law Conference, one of my favorite conferences of the year because of its subject material and the chance to hang out with so many friends. This year, the…
Will The FTC’s Crackdown On Search Ad Disclosures Hurt Google’s Revenues? (Forbes Cross-Post)
By Eric Goldman The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hates inauthentic online content. To combat this perceived ill, the FTC has been waging a multi-year battle against surreptitious ads online. The FTC has been quite clear about what it wants online…
H1 2013 Quick Links, Part 2 (Privacy, Search Engines)
By Eric Goldman and Jake McGowan Privacy * Transcript of court hearing in California v. Delta Airlines. Judge’s ruling starts p. 20. The case archive. * Fleischer v. NYP Holdings, Inc., 2013 WL 1105005 (N.Y.A.D. Mar. 19, 2013): “Plaintiff’s third and…
Google Crushes Home Decor Center’s Trademark Challenge to AdWords
By Eric Goldman Home Decor Center, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 2:12-cv-05706-GW-SH (C.D. Cal. May 9, 2013) Home Decor Center sued Google in the wake of the Fourth Circuit’s Rosetta Stone ruling. The lawsuit did not go well for it. Recently,…
Suing Like It’s 2009: Parts.com Sues Google and Yahoo for Keyword Advertising
By Eric Goldman Parts.com v. Google, 3:13-cv-01074-JLS-WMC (S.D. Cal. complaint filed May 6, 2013); and Parts.com v. Yahoo, 3:13-cv-01078-AJB-JMA (S.D. Cal. complaint filed May 6, 2013) _____ In the immediate wake of the Second Circuit’s Rescuecom ruling in 2009, about…
Assessing Winners and Losers in Google’s Worldwide Antitrust Battles (Forbes Cross-Post)
By Eric Goldman Recently, the European Commission announced details of a proposed antitrust settlement with Google (the full commitments). Google’s competitors now have the opportunity to publicly whine about the deal as part of the “market testing” procedural step. I doubt…
Competitive Keyword Advertising Lawsuit Survives Motion to Dismiss–Elcometer v. TCQ-USA
By Eric Goldman Elcometer, Inc. v. TQC-USA, Inc., 2013 WL 1433388 (E.D. Mich. April 9, 2013) There are so many competitive keyword advertising lawsuits that I can’t track them systematically, but I’ll still blog them when I see them. The…
Google Immunized for Its Search Results–Mmubango v. Google (Catch-up Post)
By Eric Goldman Mmubango v. Google, Inc., 2013 WL 664231 (E.D. Pa. February 22, 2013). The initial complaint. This is one of the many bogus pro se lawsuits over Google search results. Like the others, it goes nowhere (though the…
Online Trespass to Chattels Needs Structural Reform (Forbes Cross-Post)
By Eric Goldman In light of Aaron Swartz’s tragic suicide, there has been a lot of discussion–some productive, some not–about reforming the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (the “CFAA”). I support some of the reform proposals, but they don’t go…