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Search Engine Selling of Trademark Terms

Search Engine Selling of Trademark Terms

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0705010762may02,0,3404143.story?coll=chi-business-hed

Grey_areaQuote by Rose Hagan, one of Google’s trademark lawyers:  "We don’t sell trademarks. We sell advertising space." .. Her remark drew snickers among a crowd of several hundred trademark lawyers who attended a standing-room-only panel on Internet advertising at the International Trademark Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. As Google and the other search engines have discovered, the issue is not so black and white."

"Black and White" is being kind.. I would call it "Profoundly Grey".

What would happen if the New York Times or Wall Street Journal did away with page numbers and started naming their pages "Google", "Coca Cola", "Mercedes Benz"? ..  And suppose they did this page renumbering/naming because they knew people were more likely to view those pages because they were named after the popular brands that their readership was seeking out.  Then let’s say they sold advertising on those newspaper pages charging a premium for those with higher viewership driven by the popularity of the brands.

Sounds pretty grey to me.

This entry was posted by Frank Schilling on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 12:07 PM and is filed under Google, IP Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.


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