Free for a Fee

By Eric Goldman

Habush v. Cannon, 2013 WL 627251 (Wisc. App. Ct. Feb. 21, 2013)

Can you imagine someone buying Google ($GOOG) AdWords keyword advertising triggered by your name?  Most of us wouldn’t dream of it, usually because our names just aren’t valuable enough for anyone to bother.  In contrast, some professional service providers, such as lawyers and doctors, tout their names in expensive advertising campaigns to consumers—and have competitors who would love to piggyback on that advertising to reach the same consumers.  In a novel and persuasive ruling, a Wisconsin appellate court recent rejected a professional service provider’s attempt to use publicity rights to shut down a competitive keyword advertiser.

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By Eric Goldman

Multi Time Machine, Inc. v. Amazon.com, 2013 WL 638888 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 20, 2013).  The complaint.

No retailer does a better job of cross-selling to its customers than Amazon.com ($AMZN).  Amazon is quite effective at exposing customers to complementary—and competitive—goods along with the products a customer initially considers.  Many of us have had the experience of going to Amazon to buy one thing but checking out with a huge shopping cart of items that we didn’t initially seek—or even know were available.  Amazon’s merchandising often benefits Amazon’s customers, but trademark owners who lose sales to their competition due to it aren’t as thrilled.  Fortunately for Amazon, a California federal court recently upheld Amazon’s merchandising practices in its internal search results.

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By Eric Goldman

Stayart v. Google Inc., 2013 WL 811793 (7th Cir. March 6, 2013).

\Would you be upset if people searching for your name are prompted to search for your name plus the name of an erectile dysfunction drug like Viagra or Cialis?  For example, if you search for “Eric Goldman,” a search engine might suggest that you search for “Eric Goldman Viagra.”  I suspect many of us would never discover that the search engines were doing this, and those who did would find it perplexing but amusing.

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By Eric Goldman

Google’s ($GOOG) keyword advertising program, AdWords,  has been subject to constant legal challenges for the past decade.  After an initial period of legal uncertainty, AdWords’ legal fortunes recently have brightened in the United States and Europe.  Earlier this month, AdWords notched another strong win in court, this time in Australia.  Considering these developments as a whole, Google has effectively gotten a clean legal bill of health for its AdWords service around the globe.  Google’s impressive accomplishment also provides a useful cautionary tale about overregulating technological innovations.

Google’s Australia Win

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There are a lot of companies unhappy with how Google’s lucrative AdWords system operates. Several of them have taken the issue to court over the years, saying Google shouldn’t be allowed to key advertisements to their names, which are protected trademarks. Rosetta Stone has been one of the more persistent AdWords foes. The language-software maker sued Google in 2009, but lost completely in a Virginia federal court. However, its case was revived on appeal, and yesterday it was settled on confidential terms.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/google-settles-rosetta-stone-lawsuit-its-last-major-dispute-over-adwords/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.