Roundtable tackles trademark infringement

Event advance story for The Memphis Daily News

March 31, 2011

The law firm of Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz PC will hold a roundtable discussion Thursday on the topic “Use of Competitor’s Trademark in Keyword Advertising: Infringement or Not?”

The event is part of the American Bar Association’s Intellectual Property litigation series.

The subject of keyword advertising is relatively new in the sphere of intellectual property law. According to a New York Times article by David H. Freeman, Google’s pay-per-click advertising program – AdWords – garners the search engine behemoth more than $20 billion per year. The popularity of the program and rampant use by consumers renders it, and others like it, ripe for trademark infringement.

When a consumer searches for a term in a search engine – whether Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other – sponsored links from advertisers’ websites may appear in a section to the right of the page while regular or natural findings to the left … (read more)