Posted on 10/11/2007 8:44:23 PM PDT by jyro
Yahoo just became my new search utility:
Internet giant Google has banned advertisements critical of MoveOn.org, the far-left advocacy group that caused a national uproar last month when it received preferential treatment from The New York Times for its “General Betray Us” message.
The ads banned by Google were placed by a firm working for Republican Sen. Susan Collins’ re-election campaign. Collins is seeking her third term.
Earlier this week, Google told Lance Dutson, president of Maine Coast Designs, that the ads he placed for Collins had been removed and would not be allowed to resume because they violated Google’s trademark policy.
Google’s Web site states, “Google takes allegations of trademark infringement very seriously and, as a courtesy, we’re happy to investigate matters raised by trademark owners.” That suggests Google acted in response to a complaint by MoveOn.org.
Ronald Coleman, a lawyer and leading expert on online intellectual property disputes, noted that, as a private company, Google has the right to treat different advertisers differently.
But he called Google’s removal of the Collins ads “troubling.” Coleman says that there is no such requirement under trademark law and that Google appears to be selectively enforcing its policy.
“In a recent ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the notion that there is anything like a cause of action under the Lanham Act, the statue governing trademark law in the United States, for so-called ‘trademark disparagement,’ ” Coleman said. The courts have also rejected the notion that the use of a trademark as a search term is a “legally cognizable use” as a trademark use under federal trademark law, he added. Coleman is also general counsel for the Media Bloggers Association.
Google routinely permits the unauthorized use of company names such as Exxon, Wal-Mart, Cargill and Microsoft in advocacy ads. An anti-war ad currently running on Google asks “Keep Blackwater in Iraq?” and links to an article titled “Bastards at Blackwater — Should Blackwater Security be held accountable for the deaths of its employees?”
Well out of sheer perversity I did a Google search with Moveon.org and “the F-word” (the real word, not a euphemism) and got 235,000 hits!
This is as I expected, and the hits are predominantly psycho leftist rants with both “MoveOn.org” and that other word present.......
Not to mention how Google tinkers with images depicting Democratic icons in a bad light. Look up evil hillary or hillary bitch images on Google, then try the same search on AllTheWeb. (http://www.alltheweb.com)
You will notice completely biased results on Google.
Not to mention how YouTube does not track links from non-left-wing sites. For example, I have placed some videos on Google that have gotten huge numbers of hits... many of them came from FR. They track links to videos and hits from those links... unless they come from FR.
Google does enforce trademark policy, albeit with varying levels of scrutiny.
They’re pretty tough on infringing YouTube stuff. Some trademark stuff they remove very aggressively.
I’d like to see the ads in question. I assume there must have been some legal issue in the ads that infringed on some MoveOn trademark and MoveOn filed a notice with Google for a takedown.
Google ‘google’ til the file servers collapse....(chuckle)
An even 518,000,000 hits.
Google gave me 241,000 and MSN gave me 104,000.
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