PPCHero has a great post that discusses why trademarked terms are allowed in display URLs: Basically, a company can have a trademarked name as a real sub-domain on their site for site architecture purposes. Example, using the same Nike reference, if I own a website called shoesgalore.com, and I have a full page of Nike [...]

One of the things that I forgot to mention in my second talk at PubCon was that the search engines will provide you very little trademark defense if your trademark utilizes a generic term.  Microsoft provides a good overview of their trademark policies on a recent post on the AdCenter blog.  Note this section: Is [...]

My slides from the Domains and Trademark Issues panel at PubCon are here. I went through a number of tools that website owners can use to find abuse in domains and PPC. Clarke Walton provided an overview of trademark law and a good case study involving pubcon.com Deborah Wilcox profiled the default judgment against Punch-Clock.com [...]

Updated May 5:Google has made several changes in its trademark policies. Please visit our summary of Search Engine Trademark Policies for the current policies of the search engines. We work with several of our clients to enforce their trademark rights on Yahoo, Google and Live and felt a summary of our experiences would be useful [...]

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 [...]

Reverse IP geo-targeting is one of the most commonly used techniques by trademark infringing affiliates.  They hide themselves from occaisional monitoring by showing their ads to every geography except the geography where they believe the brand-holder is monitoring from. For example, Gap’s corporate headquarters is located in San Francisco.  A Gap affiliate could target their [...]

John Gartner has a good piece in Revenue magazine about trademark poaching, correctly identifying it as an up and coming challenge for affiliate marketers. Trademark poaching is attractive because of the low barrier to entry. For just the price of a PPC ad, publishers can quickly generate handsome commissions without the usual affiliate administration overhead, [...]

The WSJ published an article today about trademark ‘piggybacking’ in Google’s search advertising, and the growing resentment of the practice by Google’s advertisers. They use the term ‘piggybacking’ to refer to the use of: major players’ brand names, slogans or other trademarked words in the text of search ads to lure Web surfers to their [...]

Referrer Laundering is a technique frequently used by ill-intentioned websites to redirect traffic on to a second party, while masking the actual origin of the traffic. We see it frequently in affiliate search engine advertising – the user experience typically looks like this: User searches for “SampleStore” User clicks search ad for SampleStore.com The user [...]

It looks like the addition of geolabels wasn’t the only change made to Yahoo’s search results. They’ve now moved the Paypal checkout cart from alongside the title to below the ad. It looks like these changes have been in place for at least a week, although they may have been live longer. Before: After: I [...]