Pay Per Click Advertising Initiates Trademark Lawsuit
A lawsuit filed by NameSafe against LifeLock brought forth an interesting issue yesterday. Are trademarked names legally protected when it comes to pay per click advertising.
The lawsuitwas filed in the Middle District of Tennessee, where NameSafe is headquartered, and alleges that Lifelock attempted to steal the trademark and diverted traffic from NAMESAFE.com In a company issued press release founder and CEO David Ridings declared
“We have discovered that LifeLock has been sponsoring advertisements on most major search engines including (among others) Google, Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, Dogpile, and AOL, that deceptively led consumers to Lifelock.com. Specifically, when you searched ‘Namesafe.com’ in any major search engine, you found an advertisement that said ‘Namesafe.com’ but when you clicked on it, you were not directed to the official site for NAMESAFE (www.namesafe.com), but rather to our competitor, LifeLock.com.”
In an article on Name Safe, Identity Theft Labs, an ID theft company revealed that it was very common for an identity protection company to be bidding on the trademarked name of competitors until recently when LifeLock requested that competitors stop bidding on their trademarked names.
According to CNET LifeLock denied using the trademarked names of their competitors.
“Following notice of a pending lawsuit from WSMV in Nashville, TN on Thursday, we immediately began an investigation and determined that LifeLock Corporation has never purchased any competitive branded search terms. To be clear, LifeLock Corporation has never used the ‘NameSafe’ name in LifeLock ad copy.”
Can others bid on your trademarked names. This is the real concern from a legal point of view and one we have to wait for the courts to decide upon.
Filed under Legal Matters