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Court Rules Against Woman Who Didn't Like Search Results
The Seventh Circuit Court has ruled that Beverly Stayart can't sue Yahoo! because she did not like what she saw on the results page after searching for her name. Stayart claimed that her "internet presence" was damaged by Yahoo! because results for a search of her name showed listings which included pharmaceuticals and adult oriented websites. The court disagreed. From the article: "Stayart had sued under Section 43(a) of the federal Lanham Act, which prohibits false advertising, false implications of endorsement, and so on. Her problem was that a Lanham Act claim requires a showing that the plaintiff has a 'commercial interest' to protect, and Stayart did not have a commercial interest in her own name."
More likely the judge is just using the most open-and-shut logic applicable in order to put this to bed at minimal cost to all involved. My gut reaction was that this was a Bad Thing, as it left the door open for other litigious behaviors; but when I thought about it, that's the right thing for the court to do: address the case at hand, narrowly.
Probably we could have a grand old time arguing about who's responsible for keyword associations, and who owns what, and on and on... but when the law in question can be quickly shown as inapplicable by examining a single fact, what's the point letting her dump money into an effort that forces Yahoo and the taxpayers to spend additional money as well?
If she's really committed to wasting resources, perhaps she'll have her lawyer come up with another theory with which to bring a suit that cannot be so quickly set aside; if so, I guess the fun will start anew.
And in her case, she should be glad her search results are polluted with links that are obviously unrelated to her. It will cause any potential employer who might search her name to question the legitimacy of anything he finds.
Someone who is googling and not testing whether the results are false is probably someone you don't want to work for. Also someone who googles a lot would hopefully recognize that sort of thing happens a lot.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.