Eric Goldman points to a recent ruling that declared purchasing an ad based on a keyword (a practice currently allowed by Google) to be a use in commerce. Eric also points out that there has been split rulings on whether this constitutes a use in commerce: The court is right about the majority vote, but [...]

The US district court in southern California recently granted an injunction against Navigation Catalyst (nofollow) and their bulk registrar Basic Fusion (nofollow).  Navigation Catalyst is definitely among the larger domain companies and had engaged in heavy ‘domain tasting’, the registration of domain names to test them for traffic. This case is significant because it is [...]

Thomas O’Toole reviews a recent decision by the District Court in the Punch Clock v Smart Software Development case.  The two websites in question (punchclock.com & punch-clock.com). The case was won by default (the defendant didn’t appear). The defendant was found to have infringed the registered punchclock mark in violation of 15 U.S.C. 1114(1)(a) and [...]

In June of 2007, a group of plaintiffs filed a class-action cybersquatting lawsuit against domain parking companies and Google (for providing the ads to the domain parking companies). As Eric Goldman states in his initial 07 analysis “I believe this is the first lawsuit against Google for its domainer relationships.” The case moved forward slightly [...]

The 11th Circuit Court (GA) recently ruled that the use of trademarked terms in meta tags represents an infringing action, supporting a decision made by a district court. The case involves two companies that compete in the spinal decompression device market.  The defendant, Axiom, included the the plaintiffs trademarked terms ‘Accu-Spina’ and ‘IDD Therapy’ in [...]