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:
Referrer Laundering is a technique frequently used by ill-intentioned websites to redirect traffic on to a second party, while masking the actual origin of the traffic. We see it frequently in affiliate search engine advertising - the user experience typically looks like this:
It looks like the addition of geolabels wasn't the only change made to Yahoo's search results. They've now moved the Paypal checkout cart from alongside the title to below the ad. It looks like these changes have been in place for at least a week, although they may have been live longer.
With a tip of the hat to Google, Yahoo has added the geography of geo-targeted search ads below the ad text.
Techcrunch reports that CitizenHawk recently raised a $3M round.
