Originally Posted by TnT
Anything that has a legitimate trademark name such as Nike, Disney or Lego for example – can not be used unless you have prior permission to do so, or you are an authorised licence holder to use the trademark name to sell or distribute on the trademarks companies behalf.
For instance, if you make your own operating system, you can’t call yourself Microsoft-OS or such like. If you’re a trading company, you can not use another companies name if it trademarked. If you’re called Toms Bakery, and you’re using a competitors name within your site keywords / description/ such as Joes Bakery – when you’re not said company, then legal issues can arise from that, but if it’s not legally trademarked, or registered, it’s going to quickly empty someone’s wallet.
Unfortunately, the law regarding the use of names inside meta tags, especially keywords is still much in a grey area. A few years back we had a site that was copying our specific site keywords into their own site, to try and jump ahead in search rankings. The site was in direct competition, but neither site / company was trademarked or registered, or copyrighted, so not much at the time could be done about it. Further down the road, the site did get it’s name trademarked, and was able to successfully have a site removed that was using the sites name in a derogatory tone, it only took a couple of legal letters, and the host pulled the plug on the site.
If you’re a company trading with a specific name you wish to have protected, become a registered company, have the name trademarked, go through the proper copyright procedure, don’t just stick a © and date on, there’s much more to it than that. There are a number of sites available for checking your competitors sites for ‘ripped’ content and keywords, use them, and there are a number of sites providing templates for writing an initial legal proceedings letter too. However, remember, unless you’ve got the ® or legal TM then you have a vast grey area of the law as a playground.
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