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US Court Orders Company to Use Negative Keywords

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the negative-ghostrider-the-pattern-is-full dept.

A US court has ordered a firm to utilize negative adwords in their internet advertising. "Orion Bancorp took Orion Residential Finance (ORF) to court in Florida over ORF's use of the word 'Orion' in relation to financial services and products, arguing that it had used the term since 2002 and had held a trade mark for it since then. [...] The judge in the case went further, though, restraining ORF from 'purchasing or using any form of advertising including keywords or "adwords" in internet advertising containing any mark incorporating Plaintiff's Mark, or any confusingly similar mark, and shall, when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term "Orion" as negative keywords or negative adwords in any internet advertising purchased or used.'"

10 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Its perfectly reasonable by Zeinfeld · · Score: 5, Informative
    There was a pretty clear claim for trademark infringement here. The court very reasonably found that ORF was trading on Orion's reputation.

    Having made that finding the court is quite reasonably penalizing ORF. It is quite reasonable for an injunction to penalize ORF after they clearly took advantage of Orion's reputation.

    And any company that does not show up in court when served with papers is likely to find that they end up saddled with onerous terms in any case.

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  2. Re:Editors please Edit! by travdaddy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do you realize how long this sentence is? Fine for court documents, but not for a casual news site.

    It's fine, we're all very adept lawyers here.

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  3. Misinterpreting negative by Bovius · · Score: 5, Funny

    When I first read the post, for some reason I thought "negative keywords" meant they had to advertise under keywords that people wouldn't want, like "really bad financial service" or "shady loan company" or "housing lemons".

  4. Re:Orion Bankcorp: Crybabies by JustOK · · Score: 5, Funny

    Plus, everyone knows the Orion is a satire/parody website.

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  5. Re:Editors please Edit! by techpawn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Translation:
    The judge in the case went further, though, restraining
    IF
    restraining ORF from 'purchasing or using any form of advertising including keywords ||
    ('adwords' in internet advertising containing any mark incorporating Plaintiff's Mark &&
    hall, when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term 'Orion' as negative keywords) ||
    negative adwords in any internet advertising purchased or used.
    END

    I may need to debug that...

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  6. Re:Editors please Edit! by gnick · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do you realize how long this sentence is? Fine for court documents, but not for a casual news site. Sometimes, due either to an attempt to communicate a complicated idea or the desire to expand on a simple idea ad nauseum for novelty purposes, a sentence will carry on for extended lines and, if properly authored by an individual using simple words and eschewing obfuscation, it will not necessarily be difficult for the general public to understand, even without the assistance of a lawyer, translator, or advanced Communications degree.
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  7. Re:Appeal in 3..2..1.. by jeiler · · Score: 5, Informative

    Under normal circumstances I'd agree completely, but since ORF didn't show up at court, their odds of winning an appeal are slim to none.

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  8. Re:Orion, that's definitely a unique name.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    What do you expect with Perl crap from the early 90s, you think they've heard of unicode and character encoding?

  9. Re:Editors please Edit! by Hatta · · Score: 5, Funny

    They're lucky that's the only long sentence given by the judge.

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  10. Re:Editors please Edit! by SingerGuy59 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The magnitude of your copious assertion is far to sagacious for my diminutive comprehension.