{"id":492858,"date":"2010-03-31T06:03:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T10:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100316\/0234188578.shtml"},"modified":"2010-03-31T06:03:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T10:03:00","slug":"is-buying-a-google-ad-on-your-competitors-name-a-privacy-violation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/492858","title":{"rendered":"Is Buying A Google Ad On Your Competitors’ Name A Privacy Violation?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve seen tons of lawsuits from companies upset that their competitors were buying ads on their trademarked brand names. Obviously, these tend to be trademark disputes, and the suing companies rarely prevails, since most courts seem to realize that buying ads on competitor trademark keywords is perfectly legal, so long as the ad isn’t confusing. But, sometimes the arguments get quite bizarre. JJ sent over an article about two personal injury law firms in a legal fight over Google advertising — but the (initial) twist here is that the one firm is claiming that it’s a violation of Wisconsin state privacy laws<\/i><\/a> to buy keywords based on the names of the partners in the firm. It’s difficult to see who’s privacy is being violated here. And, of course, to make the case a bit more exciting, the defendants surprised everyone in court by doing a search on YellowPages.com for their own law firm — and having an ad for the plaintiff show up. So, now the defendants are claiming that the plaintiffs have “unclean hands,” since they appear to be doing the exact same thing they’ve accused the defendants of doing. It sounds like quite a trial…<\/p>\n

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We’ve seen tons of lawsuits from companies upset that their competitors were buying ads on their trademarked brand names. Obviously, these tend to be trademark disputes, and the suing companies rarely prevails, since most courts seem to realize that buying ads on competitor trademark keywords is perfectly legal, so long as the ad isn’t confusing. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}