SearchEngineLand wrote on a recent ruling by a French court that fined Google 350,000 Euros for allowing companies to bid on the trademarks of two companies.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the very recent rise in online fraud. It certainly suggests that fraud rises in the downturn.

We were honored to be nominated for the Semmy Award for best PPC post of 2008 for our post on Search Engine PPC Trademark policies.

PPCHero has a great post that discusses why trademarked terms are allowed in display URLs:

I'll be out at Affiliate Summit Sun-Tues. If you are interested in meeting up, send me a note (http://www.brandverity.com/contact/) or twitter @brandverity

Verizon issued a press release today that announced a record $33.5M cybersquatting judgment against OnlineNIC. There were 663 domains in question and the judge chose to award $50K per domain, presumably under the guidelines of the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act (ACPA), which allow a penalty of between $1K and $100K per domain. Very little is known about the actual case, and nearly all of the blog posts and press coverage simply restate the press release.

ICANN had been planning on a radical transformation of the gTLD system in May 2009 that would result in a tremendous expansion of available gTLDs (current examples of gTLDs include .biz, .mobi, .com, .org). The proposal would basically allow anyone with $185K to buy a new gTLD (although technically those are application fees).

In the Vulcan Golf vs. Google case, the judge recently denied a motion by the plaintiffs to turn the lawsuit into a class action. We've mentioned the lawsuit before, but the general gist is that the plaintiffs are alleging that Google and several other parties participate in trademark infringement by selling ads on infringing domain names.

We're excited to announce the launch of the PoachMark Pool - a collaborative approach to catching trademark poachers. It allows you to benefit from the discoveries of other members.

We picked up these recent additions to several seasonal searches. This is a tradition that Google has been doing since 2005. We've found six already - let us know if you find any more.