Stop Competitors Diverting Web Traffic: How to Prevent Misuse of Your Trademarks

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Stop Competitors Diverting Web Traffic: How to Prevent Misuse of Your Trademarks

Co-authored by Daniel Binstock

Originally published in International Technology Law Review, June 2001

Metatags are crucial to any internet presence. They are words in the form of HTML tags used to describe the content of a website. Although not readily visible to web surfers, metatags perform an important function by helping search engines analyze which websites should be listed in search results.

The greater the number of times a term appears in metatags and in the text of the webpage itself, the greater the chance that:

a) a search engine will choose that website in its search for the particular word; and

b) the website will be listed higher on the list of search results.

The use of metatags can therefore affect how often a website is accessed on the internet.

Metatag misuse

It comes as no surprise that unscrupulous traders use others' trademarks as metatags to trade off of the goodwill of the trademark to attract users to their websites. The resulting lawsuits are the easy metatag cases for courts to decide.

For example, in Niton Corp. v. Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc. (D. Mass. 1998), the plaintiff and the defendant both manufactured ...

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