Via Michael Beck (Vasco Data Security) and The Register comes this item from Pinsent Mason's Out-Law site. It's a report on a US court decision to order a company to use 'negative keywords' in order to avoid its being associated with the trade mark of another business. The case is Orion Bancorp v Orion Residential Finance (US District Court for the Middle District of Florida). Since both businesses were in the financial sector, there was plenty of scope for confusion on the internet. This is why the judge imaginatively injuncted the defendant to stop "purchasing or using any form of advertising including keywords or 'adwords' in internet advertising containing any mark incorporating Plaintiff’s Mark, or any confusingly similar mark".In addition, there was a positive order that the defendant,
"when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term 'Orion' as negative keywords or negative adwords in any internet advertising purchased or used".The 'negative adword' instructs the system never to display an advert when a certain term is searched for. Google terms these 'negative keywords', while Yahoo! calls them 'excluded words'.
The IPKat imagines that this is a neat solution in many situations and is vaguely annoyed that it never occurred to him before. Merpel says, shouldn't negative keywords be routinely negotiated wherever businesses are demerged and there is some risk of convergence of the demerged segments?
More on various Orions here, here and here
Orion recipes here
Positive outcome through negative order
Reviewed by Jeremy
on
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Rating:
Reviewed by Jeremy
on
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Rating:
Follow the IPKat on LinkedIn 
![[Guest post] EUIPO Second Board of Appeal refers case to Grand Board of Appeal following earlier refusal to register a photograph of a man’s head/face as an EU trade mark](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUj9v-k3DYaSVMR4lsmKDLHVB5nIoINuvZNbH2TQCelrfaAE9qmGSAQs-plzQ7HnZ7Svk_gRdrIODp0Nat5vpWajduit3xkArNhK76AHhX770RIJ62thfCVI5fnvcXU-5zH4NkUSfPY9FjRMFiK7OKJ7m7YSo2FzhyPSoA8ZWCsxaOXb0bBCoPQA/s72-c/Picture%201.png)
![[Guest post] Benelux Office rules on opposition proceedings prepared by ChatGPT](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi29VY0rNNP1Hqyz8RgB47r4q7fhqQfYHxsEbX_RKmT4KU5Y_vg7vB6dsAW91CidjMfJ38klTvD4mMtZb3QmwFPAHaGF88BPttWSbfYvo7UUg7MpFRTNtEjThmG0QaX2qZFFHSnN71i3YQZSBFC0SL7PgkAlme-XH8cSNWRFbOAOuLr_LMOGcImLQ/s72-c/Screenshot%202024-12-04%20at%2020.45.58.png)
Posts
No comments:
All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.
It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.
Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html