Protecting trademarks in cyberspace is always a challenge. One hot area is the topic of “keyword infringement” when third parties use non-proprietary trademarks as keyword triggers or in the banner copy of advertisements placed on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These are always fact-specific problems. When someone uses a third party trademark with the specific intention of causing confusion as to the source and origin of the products, that use probably qualifies as trademark infringement. However, there are many instances 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 response. You will not receive any further notifications from us.

Yahoo! Search Marketing does not endorse or condone trademark infringing websites. However, we generally have no control over the content presented by advertisers who list their websites in our search engine. Yahoo! Search Marketing requires each website to be relevant according to our guidelines. In summary, 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. Distributor: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale) the product or service that bears the trademark (for example, an online shoe store that sells Nike shoes on its landing page could bid on the term search “nike”).

2. Information site, non-competitive: the primary purpose of the advertiser’s site is to provide substantial information about the owner of the trademark 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. owner’s products or services (for example, a site that offers product reviews may bid on the brands of the products being reviewed, and a site that provides news information about a company may bid on the company name as a term search).

3. Generic use (not related to trademark): The advertiser uses the term in a generic or merely descriptive way that is not related to the goods or services of the trademark owner (for example, we would allow an advertiser who sells apples bids on the search term “apple”, while an advertiser in the computer software / hardware industry bidding on the term “apple” must have content relevant to the Apple computer product brand Computer, Inc. and comply with our policy as described above).

While we are not in a position to arbitrate trademark disputes or other intellectual property disputes between third parties, if a trademark owner draws our attention to a website 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.

Note that Yahoo! Search Marketing doesn’t remove keywords from an ad title or description in response to a trademark claim. Conversely, if an ad violates our trademark policy, Yahoo! Search Marketing will remove the unsupported ad. If an ad complies with our trademark policy, the ad will be retained and no changes will be made.

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

If you are submitting a complaint 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 We therefore recommend trademark owners to resolve their disputes directly with advertisers, especially since advertisers may have similar advertisements 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 trademarks 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, on the left side of a results page. For any objections, please contact the site owner directly.

Trademark Policies

See below if you are concerned:

* Advertisers using their trademark in AdWords ads.

o Trademark claim 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 “