Utah’s Keyword Legislation Passes House in 38-36 Vote
By Anna Johnson on March 9th, 2009A bill that restricts search advertisers from bidding on ads for trade-marked keywords passed the Utah House of Representatives last Friday. The bill will now go to the Utah Senate for review and, if passed, will become law.
The House voted 38 to 36 in favor of the bill which modifies a previous law, the trade mark Protection Act, enacted in March 2007, which prohibited advertisers from bidding on words that were competitors’ trade marks.
AOL, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all strongly opposed the original law and wrote to the Utah House Speaker claiming it was a “discriminatory obstacle to Internet advertising and consumer choice that exists nowhere else in the country.”
The new bill tones down the punitive nature of the previous legislation which went so far as to provide for punitive damages or enforcement against advertisers using competitors’ trade marks.
Instead, the new bill provides for civil action, and states that trade mark registrants cannot recover profits or damages unless their trade marks have been used to cause confusion or deceive consumers.
The bill also only affects advertisers targeting ads to Utah residents, and doesn’t penalize search engines that don’t offer geotargeting.
Source: Kate Kaye, “Utah Search Bill Passes House, Moves to Senate,” ClickZ, Mar 6, 2009
March 10th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
In a way the regulation is good for the sack of protecting the public interest that is to ensure these trade registrants are not manipulating the so called the customer choice in order to gain easy profits.