Brand Spillovers at TPRC

By Eric Goldman At TPRC, I presented my Brand Spillovers paper. My slides.

Utah Trademark Protection Act Update

By Eric Goldman Kate Kaye at ClickZ provides an update on the Utah Trademark Protection Act. According to Kate, there have been extensive and continuous backroom negotiations to produce a new statute (too bad this can’t take place with more…

Keyword Metatags Revisited

By Eric Goldman For years, I’ve been saying that keyword metatags are technologically irrelevant and therefore should be legally irrelevant. My conclusion was heavily based on the research of Danny Sullivan, a guru on this topic. Recently, Danny updated his…

August 2007 Quick Links, Part I

By Eric Goldman Search Engines * Google extended its ad serving technology to consider a user’s past search phrases in addition to their current search term. * Greg Linden: “Google is teasing too many lions.” * BusinessWeek: Some VCs are…

American Blinds-Google Lawsuit Settles

By Eric Goldman Google Inc. v. American Blinds & Wallpaper Factory Inc., 5:03-cv-05340-JF (N.D. Cal. settled August 31, 2007) After almost four years of litigation, the American Blinds lawsuit ended today with a stunning victory for Google. According to a…

Search Engine Strategies Copyright and Trademark Panel

By Eric Goldman Today I participated in the Copyright and Trademark panel at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, along with Clarke Walton, Eve Chaurand-Fraser of Ask, Mary Berk of Microsoft and Debra Wilcox of Baker & Hostetler. As usual,…

American Airlines Sues Google Over Keyword Ads

American Airlines v. Google, 4:07-cv-00487 (N.D. Tex. complaint filed Aug. 16, 2007) [Warning: 4.4MB file] “American Airlines does not bring this lawsuit lightly.” (para. 6) Well, this is interesting. It’s not unusual for a trademark owner to sue Google for…

Lemley on Online Safe Harbors

By Eric Goldman Mark Lemley, Rationalizing Internet Safe Harbors Mark Lemley has weighed in on an topic near and dear to my heart–secondary liability online. He advances two principal arguments in his paper. First, it would make sense to harmonize…

2007 Cyberspace Law Syllabus

By Eric Goldman I’ve posted my 2007 Cyberlaw syllabus. Unlike the past few years, which were a little slow cyberlaw-wise, the past 12 months saw a lot of important developments. Let me recap some of changes I made to my…

Food Tastes Better When Branded “McDonalds”

By Eric Goldman Recently I blogged on a study showing that consumers like search results more when they are branded as coming from Google, even if the search results are substantively identical. We now have a similar study, this time…