Sarah Bird at SEOMoz put together an excellent summary of the DSW vs. Zappos case. DSW sued Zappos because one of Zappo's affiliates created organic pages that targeted DSW terms, used DSW TMs in the domain names, used DSW images, but linked to Zappos pages (through CJ).
I sat in on a meeting of the Rocky Mountain Affiliate Marketing Association (RMAMA) and presented an overview of BrandVerity and how an affiliate manager should use the service. The meeting consisted of a group of merchants OPMs and interested third parties.
One of the things that I forgot to mention in my second talk at PubCon was that the search engines will provide you very little trademark defense if your trademark utilizes a generic term. Microsoft provides a good overview of their trademark policies on a recent post on the AdCenter blog. Note this section:
My slides from the Domains and Trademark Issues panel at PubCon are here. I went through a number of tools that website owners can use to find abuse in domains and PPC.
I spoke on the Affiliate PPC Issues panel Tuesday at Pubcon with Jon Kelly and Adam Jewel. I touched on a number of proven strategies that we've seen our clients utilize to build strong affiliate PPC policies and procedures. My slides are here. I think I may have gone a little bit far in avoiding pitching our service - the first question after the presentations was someone asking me to recommend a service that can monitor affiliate policies...
We recently launched several new features that our customers have consistently requested. We believe that these features should improve your ability to get and share the information we collect for you.
A lot of press has been generated over the last few weeks about Google's AdSense for Domains programs and a potential class action suit that claims Google is assisting trademark violation. I've seen estimates that Google makes anywhere between several hundred million to a billion dollars from its domain parking program.
I spoke with Chris Sanderson of AMWSO yesterday to learn a bit more about search in Asia as well as to provide him an overview of BrandVerity. Chris put together a good summary on the importance of monitoring PPC policy abuse as well as some of his early thoughts on PoachMark on the AMWSO blog. He also offers advice to new PoachMark users on how best to utilize the system (we're taking a few of his thoughts to heart as we evolve the trial program).
We recently launched several new PoachMark features:
