Company Sued for Including Competitor’s Names in Meta Tags   - 3,697 Views, 1 Comment

Summary: Blood Diagonostics, a South Carolina biopharmaceutical firm, has sued Health Coalition Inc. ("HCI"), claiming that HCI has used Blood Diagonostic's name in meta tags on the HCI website. Blood Diagnostics claims that the use was a calculated act on the part ...

Previous Article « Spyware vs. Spyware
Read Next Article » Commerce One’s Web Services Patents Acquired by Mystery Bidder

  Follow Anne on Twitter     Friend Anne on Facebook

Blood Diagonostics, a South Carolina biopharmaceutical firm, has sued Health Coalition Inc. (”HCI”), claiming that HCI has used Blood Diagonostic’s name in meta tags on the HCI website. Blood Diagnostics claims that the use was a calculated act on the part of HCI intended to harm Blood Diagnostic’s business.

According to an article in Law.com, although there is plenty of precedence where courts have slapped down meta tags which infringe on the trademarks of others (webmasters take note), this case is unique because there is a long history of ongoing animosity between the parties. This could play into a determination of damages should Blood Diagnostics prevail.

According to a computer law expert attorney quoted in the article, Samuel Lewis, the new trend is actually away from meta tags, and towards “white on white” text, in an effort to woo search engines which no longer give much weight to meta tags.

However, in any case, padding your website with a competitor’s trademarks is a bad idea.

Don’t do it.

You can read more about this at Law.com.

Company Sued for Including Competitor’s Names in Meta Tags

 Follow Anne on Twitter

 Twitter Explained in Plain English

 Friend Anne on Facebook

Previous Article « Spyware vs. Spyware
Read Next Article » Commerce One’s Web Services Patents Acquired by Mystery Bidder

Read more:

»  Windows Metafile WMF Vulnerability - 0-Day Exploit Overdrive

»  Major Domain Names In Bankruptcy Sale

»  Microsoft WMF Patch for Windows Metafile (WMF) Issue Released Early - Get It Now!

»  Competitors of U.S. Companies Captured $133 Billion of Proprietary Information in 2004 (News Release)

For additional similar stories check out our archives on Everything Else

NOTE: We never, ever, ever will recommend any product or service on this site that we have not regularly used ourselves and do not wholeheartedly believe in. That said, in some cases after being very pleased with a product or service, we may enter into a relationship with the provider of that product or service such that if someone purchases that product or service based on our recommendation, we may get a small payment. Such payments go towards the upkeep of the Internet Patrol.

 

1 Comment »

  1. Company Sued for Including Competitor?s Names in Meta Tags
    Blood Diagonostics, a South Carolina biopharmaceutical firm, has sued Health Coalition Inc. (”HCI”), claiming that HCI has used Blood Diagonostic?s name in meta tags on the HCI website. Blood Diagnostics claims that the use was a calculated act on th…

    Trackback by Lockergnome's Web Developers — 12/8/2004 @ 11:29 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Warning! All comments which contain URLs and are clearly just spam to generate a link back to the URL will be deleted on sight. Don't bother wasting your time!

If you are going to include a URL in your comment,
please keep it under 25 characters in length,
or use TinyURL to shorten it before including it in your comment.

Line and paragraph breaks are automatic, your email address is never displayed.
HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)


If you have not posted a comment here before, we apologize for having to ask you to enter the letters and numbers you see in the image above to validate your comment, but we are being attacked by thousands of comment form spams every day! You only need to do this once; once you have successfuly posted a comment here you will not be asked to do this again. Thank you for your understanding!

 
 This article first appeared on 12/8/2004
The Internet Patrol
Patrolling the Internet for You!