rcjordan - 5:04 pm on Mar 18, 2001 (gmt 0)

No, you're not paranoid. If you use their trademarked name and gain financial benefit from it (in increased traffic/conversions, let's say), then Acme may have a case of against you. You're in significant jeopardy (assuming Acme is aggressive) if you use their name in titles, metas, or cloaking. However, this gets fuzzy if you are making comparisons, such as "10 reasons XYZ widgets are better than those manufactured by ACME" -and spiders visit those pages, too.

The real issue comes down to whether the consumer may be confused in any way as to which company/product is which. I've seen some very far-reaching legal judgements in the press on this that have gone in favor of the trademark holder. In one case, involving a foreign webmaster using dotcoms, the FTC had NetSol revoke the registration of the domains. In another more recent one, the offending publisher was ordered not to use the word in the domain and EVEN in the url (as subdirectory names). These actions literally wiped the opposing sites off the face of the web.

disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer (Thank Goodness!).