Courts and the META Tag

tomreagan writes "The San Francisco Ninth Court of Appeals has ruled that it is illegal to use someone else's trademarks in your META tags. A company called Brookfield Entertainment sued West Coast Video for putting "moviebuff" in their META tags, a term which it Brookfield has copyrighted. The court ruled that WestCoast video had to remove the word from its pages META tags. The really scary thing is that West Coast Video and Brookfield are in totally different businesses - it would seem that this means anyone can be sued for any infringement. Webmasters everywhere should be quaking in their boots on this one. The original story can be found here on the NYTimes website and the judgment can be found here on a Villanova website.

Comments

Trademarks are not copyrights, and vice versa

[alkali]

Because there's some confusion about this n some of the foregoing comments, I'd point out that trademark protection of a word or phrase is not the same as copyright protection of a lengthy text.

Trademark law, in a nutshell, goes like this: If I use "Quality" as the trade name for my dog food,

• it doesn't mean that people can no longer use the word "quality",
• it doesn't mean that people can't simply talk about "Quality Dog Food" in a non-advertising context, and
• at least in the case of regular words like "quality" -- as opposed to made-up words like "Xerox" or "Slashdot" -- it doesn't mean you can't use the same exact word to sell a different product (e.g., "Quality Dry Cleaning").

All the trademark means is that there are restrictions on the way you can use the word when you advertise for some other product: In particular, you have to make clear that the product you're advertising is made by someone other than the manufacturer who uses that trade name.

I'd agree that these META-tag cases are harder than the typical trademark case, but not by much. If I put "Slashdot Cola tastes better than Coca-Cola" in the text of my web page advertising /.-brand beverages, there's no confusion -- it's clear to everyone that I'm selling something else. But the whole point of META tags is to work in the background (i.e., so you don't have to put "delicious carbonated presweetened cola flavored beverage" in the text of the page, but you can still pick up people looking for such things with search engines). If I look for "Coca-Cola" and find the /. Cola page without any explanation of why I got that result, I might assume that this was a new brand of Coke, or that Coke was now calling itself something different. That's trading on Coke's goodwill, and that's what the trademark laws prohibit. There may be some harder cases, but I think the general rule is sound.

(Come to think of it, I could go for an ice-cold Slashdot Cola right now. I wonder if there are any left in the fridge. (glug glug glug) Aaaah, so refreshing.)