Eric Goldman points to a recent ruling that declared purchasing an ad based on a keyword (a practice currently allowed by Google) to be a use in commerce.

Trademark use management remains one of the greater challenges for brands that maintain affiliate programs. Most of the sessions that I've been to so far touch on trademarks and their use/abuse at some point over the course of their talk.

A few months ago, Yahoo began running search ads with an icon that resembled Google's checkout icon.

The US district court in southern California recently granted an injunction against Navigation Catalyst (nofollow) and their bulk registrar Basic Fusion (nofollow). Navigation Catalyst is definitely among the larger domain companies and had engaged in heavy 'domain tasting', the registration of domain names to test them for traffic.

The judge in the 2004 lawsuit between Tiffany and eBay has finally ruled, dealing an important victory to eBay and providing a setback to Tiffany and other manufacturers that frequently find counterfeit goods on auction sites.

Reverse IP geo-targeting is one of the most commonly used techniques by trademark infringing affiliates. They hide themselves from occaisional monitoring by showing their ads to every geography except the geography where they believe the brand-holder is monitoring from.

While most lawsuits involving trademarks and search engine advertising identify the search companies as defendants, CNET recently covered a lawsuit between two competitors that sell identity theft protection services. Namesafe, sued Lifelock in the federal district court of Tennessee for trademark infringement and is seeking damages, attorney's fees and an injunction against Lifelock.

John Gartner has a good piece in Revenue magazine about trademark poaching, correctly identifying it as an up and coming challenge for affiliate marketers.

The WSJ published an article today about trademark 'piggybacking' in Google's search advertising, and the growing resentment of the practice by Google's advertisers. They use the term 'piggybacking' to refer to the use of:

Stephen Heise (via SearchEngineLand) identifies some advertisers that are cloaking their AdWords URLs: