Legalities Of PPC Keywords

Can a cease and desist stop my PPC campaign?

[techrealm]

Can a cease and desist stop my PPC campaign? A major competitor is trying to get me to stop targeting their domain name in my keywords. I have used their domain name with out the tld only in the ppc engines and the ads shown for us are of the "Another Opportunity?" type of link. I am being sweated by upper management to find out if this is legal and worth doing? These are highly targeted leads that do generate calls and sales -- it also causes the competitor to sweat tremendously now that they have noticed (after 2 years).

[Slade]

If your boss wants a legally advised answer, you need to consult a lawyer.

[techrealm]

Getting legally advised will occur I am sure but I am also looking to see if others have had similiar issues. Also note that the keyword used also describes the process used by the products. That is how overture accepted my bids.

[Mardi_Gras]

If your boss is looking for you to come up with answers to legal questions he/she is putting you in a very difficult - perhaps untenable - position. I understand you are looking for guidance but Slade gave you the best advice available here.

You need a copyright/trademark attorney.

[Tapolyai]

I agree you will need a lawyer (@~#$!@#$), but just think about it - it isn't brain surgery. If the word or their domain name is a registered trade mark or copyrighted they are in the right.

Example: "coca cola" as a key word on "pepsi cola" web site. Clearly the words "coca cola" are protected by copyrights, and Pepsi is infringing on Coke(c)'s rights. On the other hand "cola" is not and most likely cannot (well let's not put it beyond the mental midgets in the gov) be copyright protected.

Get a lawyer, pay $5,000, find out if you are up the creek.

[john316]

Sounds like upper management should get legal advice before they do edgy things...

Sounds like they are working on their defense now: "My webmaster did it."

[bird]

If their domain name is a generic term that also applies to products manufactured by others, then I don't see how they can keep you from bidding on it. The only possibility for them would be a claim to a trademark, but generic terms aren't protectable as trademarks. The ownership of a domain name in itself doesn't imply any further rights to the words included in that domain name.

Just as a very obvious example: Do you think that business.com could prevent anyone from bidding on the keyword "business"? Your term may not be quite as obvious, but it may be worth to further explore this general line of thought.

Best to find a lawyer who understands both the online world and trademark law to get an educated opinion.

<added> don't worry about copyright, for individual terms only trademark law is relevant</added>

[edited by: bird at 9:32 pm (utc) on Nov. 5, 2002]

[techrealm]

ok I told them in "my" opinion it is mearly a phrase describing a process,but in a lawyers opinion its likely to be different and they need to call for legal advice and keep me up to speed on how much we want edge things. The exact keyword "we make things" is not listed in the trademark databases. However it is listed in the format "we-make-things". Their domain name is wemakethings.com,net,org and (gasp) we-make-things.com which defaults to the famous IIS index page... yep they are paying attention. :-) Another neat piece of info is that we manufacture their equipment... And this came up in a new contract they want to do soo I may "give up" ;-) the PPC keyword for a price. (Now "I" need legal advice :-))

[bird]

Hmmm... the way you describe it now it looks much more like a dangerous borderline case than before. Either you bosses can negotiate something, or the lawyers will fill their pockets.

[techrealm]

Much thanks to Bird, Tapolyai, john316 for the advice and the others for echoing legal sanity. After review of the last 4 months of logs we found that the PPC key word came to our site in three distinct phrase: 1. "we make things" 2. "wemakethings" and 3."we-make-things". The leads from 2 and 3 equal the amount of 1 so we are offering to remove keywords 2 and 3 as they are close enough to their domain name and trademarks that we will stop being so obviously predatory. There is a disagreement about if we will keep key word 1 as I believe it is too generic of a phrase and really does describe the generic process of "we make things" but our ceo does not use a computer so he is a bit uneducated on how people get to our site in general. And the search is on for legal and financial repercussions of keeping vs. dropping the keywords to backup a opinion on that as well so... so.. we can get back to fixing our lame html code...Again THANKS! VERY HELPFUL!

[vibgyor79]

Search for the keyword "overture" in Google and it throws up "CPC Ads that Work - Great ROI - Try Google AdWords Now!" under Premium Sponsorship.

I wonder if Overture will sue Google for that!

[techrealm]

And the mess rolls on ...

My CEO had me write up a letter to him as he still doesnt understand it... The lawyers didnt call me back when I tried to get some info :-) joy -- so I get to 'wing' being vague and responsive in one fell swoop.

I hear its nice in Baja this time of year<daydreams>... </daydreams>

Good day,

As of November 7, 2002, by request we removed all keywords / meta-tags that refer to We-Make-Things from any online ad sources. At this point any residual search engine results that have “we%20make%20things” or similar results in the resulting sponsored url section are not current and do not reflect our current unpaid or paid advertising desires and objectives.

Also on numerous sites results that are not of the paid nature, a third party reviewer placed our results in the same categories, this is not possible to change in most every case.

As well there are search results that indicate our sites contain similar products and offerings. This is a reflection of search engines algorithms and not due to keyword/meta tag targeting of "WMT" name variations. While this may be disconcerting at first, careful examination of the link should find that it is not due to a current practice of targeting "WMT" name variations.

A review of the following keywords:
1. we make things
2. we-make-things
3. wemakethings

Found that out of the 285 separate visits that were received by these three keywords combined (out of over 50k other seperate visits), no apparent or even indirect connection to a visit and a resulting sale could be made.

As a result of the changes, I am monitoring the keywords and will do what I can to remove the offending search results, but this reverse method of removing results is not infallible and due to technical or many other reasons may never result in complete removal of the information from the web.

Any results that are found to be targeting specifically those keywords should be brought to my attention so we can determine the source and have them removed.

Regards,
TechRealm

"If all else fails, blame the webmaster..."