Richmond.com: “Dozier Sues College Dropout for Trademark Infringement”:

Dozier alleges, “Riley is particularly fond of attacking law firms with whom he competes for the business of representing entrepreneurs and inventors in intellectual property negotiations.”
In Dozier’s case, the lawsuit contends, the Riley businesses have launched a Web page that contains twelve different instances in which the trademark “Dozier Internet Law” is exclusively used as anchor text in a hypertext link. As Dozier explains it, “An anchor link is supposed to describe the destination a visitor will reach when clicking on the link, and functions much like a road map with a shortcut. These anchor links, however, do not take a visitor to the Dozier Internet Law website. Rather, the links send the party clicking on them to the main website used by the Riley Businesses that offer services which directly compete with Dozier Internet Law.”

Read the whole article. I look forward to reading the complaint.

Here’s one version: A link to a six year old article about United Airlines’ bankruptcy appeared on a Tribune newspaper’s website (why?). The traffic pushed it into a most-viewed box, which brought it to the attention of a “Google news search agent”(?). That brought it to the attention of Bloomberg News, which widely distributed the article. and then United’s stock fell 76%. Then trading was suspended, the error was corrected, and the stock rebounded.
The people who sold at the bottom lost real money. How did the link appear on the paper’s page in the first place?

The RNC comes to you and they say they want to use these stockphotos:
mcmontage2.jpg
istockphoto_6142353-senior-couple-on-cycle-ride.jpg
in this video (the photos appears at 6:46 and 7:02 respectively):

The first photo seems to appear with the words ‘America will choose’ and the second photo appears with ‘prosperity.”
The iStockPhoto license defines “Prohibited Use” in part as:

“use or display any Content that features a model or person in a manner that (i) would lead a reasonable person to think that such person uses or personally endorses any business, product, service, cause, association or other endeavour; or (ii) that depicts such person in a potentially sensitive subject matter, including, but not limited to mental and physical health issues, social issues, sexual or implied sexual activity or preferences, substance abuse, crime, physical or mental abuse or ailments, or any other subject matter that would be reasonably likely to be offensive or unflattering to any person reflected in the Content;”

How do you advise?

Money.cnn.com: “Google Slaps FindLaw In Effort to Crack Down On ‘Link Juice’:

“FindLaw, a subsidiary of the business information giant Thomson Reuters Corp. (TRI), built Newell his Web site last spring and primed it to appear in major search engines for a fee of about $1,600 per month. It was such a success that one year later Newell was willing to sign up for the SEM Advantage product, costing another $2,000 a month. Billed as a “high-octane” way to double or even triple traffic on his site, Newell and others like him understood FindLaw’s SEM Advantage product to be a package of well-placed links designed to lift a Web site’s standing in a Google search. But now they’re wondering if they’re still getting their money’s worth.”