When I did keyword research for a small web design firm in Oklahoma City a number of years ago we had very little restrictions. I was able to research words to my hearts content and place those words in the meta keyword tag and behold our clients were being found on popular search engines. Now realize this, at the same time Google wasn’t the juggernaut that it is today.
Back then we looked like absolute geniuses if we could get websites ranked high on services such as:
Excite
Alta Vista
Metacrawler
Webcrawler
It was common practice that if we wanted to drive large amounts of traffic we would use verbiage that people spoke in their vocabulary everyday. An example of this would be we might prefer a particular beverage, so we simply say “Doctor Pepper”, “Coca-Cola”, “Pepsi” and didn’t think anything about it. So we would in turn, if you were marketing a cola beverage we would use that same verbiage in the keyword meta tag and viola you’ve successfully into the market place with some of the big name beverages and you were off and running.
In 2009 the rules of the game has changed dramatically, and the practices we used in the early nineties simply can not be utilized today. Many people do not realize that over the years court cases have laid down a barrage of legal presidence that could land one in severe legal trouble simply by ignoring copyright and trademark law. One look at our spam folder where trademarked words such a “Viagra”, “Cialis” and “Lipitor” and we could begin to question how one could use those words in their email marketing campaign without any sort of legal repercussion what so ever.
Make no mistake, using copyrighted or trademarked catch phrases or names in a keyword campaign is a violation of copyright law and the legal department of the companies who own such copyrighted and trademarked material will have a field day hauling you into a federal court (in the United States) and sue you or the company you represent into oblivion.
I recite the following cases:
On June 15th, 2007 Vulcan Golf LLC, filed suit against Google and a number of “parked domain services” for trademark infringement over the use of AdSense for Domains on websites with allegedly infringing domain names.
On October 17th, 2008 American Airlines, Inc filed a lawsuit against Yahoo Inc and Overture Inc, over the use of their copyrights and trademarks to be sold as keywords to be used in commercial and paid advertisements.
On June 18th, 2004 Tiffany filed legal action against E-Bay as part of their counterfeit suit, claimed trademark infringement, claiming their trademark was being used by select users using the service unlawfully.
The list goes on and on, so what does that mean for you? It means you are treading a very fine legal line when you attempt to use certain verbiage in your keyword marketing campaigns and you could be opening yourself for an array of legal consequences by using such verbiage.
When in doubt, one should always make liberal use of some free Internet resources to check and see if the terms you want to use are copyrighted or trademarked:
United States Trademark Database
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=r9kfk7.1.1
United States Copyright Database
http://www.copyright.gov/records/
You might be asking yourself:
“Is that it?”
“Is that all I have to do?”
“If I look up the terms I use in those two resources, and if nothing comes up does that mean I am in the clear?”
I might be running the risk of being an absolute “killjoy” here but here is the answer:
“No!”
Other countries like the United States have their own individual copyright and trademark laws and while I was unable to locate specific cases in which someone in the United States was held accountable for copyright or trademark infringement in other countries, it’s naive to suggest that this too couldn’t be a possibility. While, I am not a legal expert I would encourage everyone who is reading this article to always exercise caution. For it’s always best to be safe than sorry.
What are your thoughts?
