Dynamic Insertion and Trademarked Keywords

Does the nature of automation deny copyright?

[Murdoch]

Earlier this year Google settled a lawsuit with a large insurance company over the bidding on of trademarked terms. The courts, while not completely ruling in favor of Google (the settlement was made before the trial proceeded) did say that in order for an ad to infringe on copyrights, the term would have to be present in the ad, and create plausible confusion in it's relation to the original copyright owner.

What about dynamic insertion though? Does the fact that the term is not actually in the copy make it circumvent the laws in place? I ask because I am currently having a particular issue with a competitor's ad.

Granted, our company name can be used in a manner where it seems that it is a commonly used term. For the sake of argument, we'll call it Widget Master. The competitor uses dynamic insertion in both the headline and the ad copy, so it would end up looking like this:

Widget Master
Everything you need to know about
Widget Master

And that's it. That's the whole thing. You would think if you wanted to know everything about Widget Master, you would go to the Widget Master website right? But since they aren't intentionally placing that in the ad, does it count as infringement?

[SFReader]

It would be hard to sell a service to users of a given company, without naming the company.

That copy wouldn't make me think they were Widget Master, unless Widgetmaster.com was the URL at the bottom of the copy.

[SEOtop10]

I recently found that a client's ad had to be taken off because they were dynamically inserting the name of some companies in their "compare to" ads.

So I will assume that it does not matter how the ad is generated (static text or dynamic keyword insertion), what matters is the final ad text, that is displayed.

[ckellsworth]

It also depends on if the competitor(s) cares or not. with enough money and some layers they could make your life troublesome.