Trademark infringement in keyword advertising on Yahoo and Google

Protecting brands in cyberspace is always a challenge. One hot area is the issue of “keyword infringement” when third parties use trademarks that they don’t own as keyword triggers or in the ad copy of ads placed on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are always specific questions of fact. When someone uses a third-party trademark with the specific intent to cause confusion as to the source and origin of products, that use likely qualifies as trademark infringement. However, there are many cases of gray areas in the field of keyword infringement.

Here is Yahoo’s response to a keyword infringement complaint, including a link to their policy on keyword infringement:

“Thank you for your correspondence. This email will serve as our reply. You will not receive any further notifications from us.

yahoo! Search Marketing does not condone or condone websites that infringe the trademarks. However, we generally have no control over the content submitted by advertisers who list their websites on our search engine. yahoo! Search Marketing requires that each website be relevant according to our guidelines. In short, we allow advertisers to bid on a search term that may be the trademark of another party, as long as your ad meets one of the following conditions:

1. Reseller: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the trademarked product or service (for example, an online shoe store selling Nike shoes on its landing page might bid on the term of search) Nike”).

2. Informational, Non-Competitive Site: The advertiser’s site’s primary purpose is to provide material information about the trademark owner or the products or services bearing the trademark, AND the advertiser’s site does not sell or endorse a product or service that competes with the trademark. the owner’s products or services (for example, a site that provides product reviews may bid on the brand names of the products being reviewed, and a site that provides news information about a company may bid on the company name as a search term).

3. Generic (Non-Trademark) Use: The advertiser uses the term in a generic or merely descriptive manner unrelated to the trademark owner’s goods or services (for example, we would allow an advertiser selling apples to bid on the search term “apple”, while an advertiser in the computer software/hardware industry bidding on the term “apple” should have relevant content related to the Apple Computer, Inc. brand of computer products and comply with our policy described previously).

While we are not in a position to adjudicate trademark or other intellectual property disputes between third parties, if a website is brought to our attention by a trademark owner that they believe does not contain relevant content, we will review the website to verify that meets our guidelines. Therefore, we will review the search results returned through Yahoo! Search Marketing search services on the search terms in question and the corresponding websites, and will take appropriate action.

Please note that Yahoo! Search Marketing does not remove keywords from the title or description of an ad in response to a trademark claim. Rather, if an ad violates our trademark policy, Yahoo! Search Marketing will remove the non-compliant ad. If an ad complies with our trademark policy, it will be retained and no changes will be made.

Also, please note that any ad that is removed as a result of our review may be resubmitted by the advertiser and included in our search results, if changes are made to the title or description of the ad, or the content of the website. . , so that ads comply with our guidelines.

If you are going to complain to Google, this is the type of response you will receive:

“As a provider of ad space, please note that Google is not in a position to arbitrate trademark disputes between advertisers and trademark owners. As stated in our Terms and Conditions, advertisers themselves are responsible for the words keyword and the content of the ads they use.Choose the trademark you want to use.As a result, we encourage owners to resolve disputes directly with advertisers, particularly as advertisers may have similar ads on other sites.

However, as a courtesy to trademark owners, we are willing to conduct a limited investigation of reasonable complaints.

Please note: The following procedure applies only to the use of terms that may be trademarked in advertisements, which are clearly marked as sponsored links on our results pages. We do not take action on objections to the use of trademarks on sites that appear in our search results, that is, the left-hand side of a results page. For such objections, please contact the site owner directly.

Trademark Policies

See below if you are concerned about:

* Advertisers using your trademark in AdWords advertising.

o Trademark Complaint Procedure Page

* Authorize a third-party advertiser to use your trademark in AdWords ads.

Please note that we will only authorize accounts to use terms for which we have received trademark complaints.

o Trademark Authorization Process”