Ben Edelman has released a preliminary report on Gator, which monitors users’ visits and provides targeted pop-up advertising.  Ben has devised a method for discerning which third-parties may be using Gator to target a particular website.  Ben describes his report as follows:

“I today released “Documentation of Gator Advertisements and Targeting,” a report that describes my methodology and findings, including more than seven thousand speciic web sites targeted by Gator.  My report also offers users a web form for testing whether Gator targets specified sites, and if it does, viewing the speciic ads Gator shows.”

I have used Ben’s services on behalf of a client and his test appears to do what he says it does.

Producers of Prosciutto di Parma ham and Grana Padano cheese prevailed in the European Court of Justice as the ECJ upheld laws requiring purveyours of products bearing those appellations of origin to perform certain processes (in this case slicing the ham and grating the cheese) in the region of origin.  Parties to the cases (including Wal-Mart’s ASDA supermarket) had been importing the products from Italy and processing them abroad.  The Court, in its unofficial press release, noted that:

. . . the grating of cheese and slicing of ham and their packaging constitute important operations which may damage the quality and authenticity and consequently the reputation of the PDO [protected designation of origin] if those requirements are not complied with. The specifications for Grana Padano cheese and Parma ham define checks and detailed strict operations in order to preserve the reputation of those two products.

The PDOs of those products would not be protected in the same way by an obligation imposed on operators outside the region of production to inform consumers by appropriate labelling that grating, slicing and packaging have taken place outside that region. There are therefore no alternative, less restrictive measures to attain the objective pursued.

However, the Court finds that the protection conferred by a PDO does not normally extend to operations such as grating, slicing and packaging the product. The Court states that those operations are prohibited to third parties outside the region of production only if that is expressly laid down in the specification. The principle of legal certainty requires that adequate publicity be given to those prohibitions – for example being mentioned … – to bring them to the attention of third parties. In the absence of such publicity, those prohibitions cannot be relied on before a national court.

The link to the decision will be available shortly on the www.curia.eu.int site.

More info on Parma here.

More info on Grano Padano here.

European Union’s searchable database of PDOs here.

Prof. Lessig is soliciting support to introduce a bill into Congress re amending the Copyright Act re: copyright terms.  Details here.

Interesting discussion on Kuro5hin.org re how to build tarpits to catch RIAA spiders.

The Trademark Blog started a year ago today.  I sent in my renewal fee to Radio Userland yesterday.  Thanks guys for creating a great program.

In the past year:

-two people wrote me to warn that the Nigerian bank email was a scam;

-one person wrote to inform that contrary to what I had written, chutzpah is not a Native American Indian word;

-one person asked me if I could put him in touch with Jessica Lynch;

-two people asked if they could have Mecca Cola distributorships;

-many people came looking for picture of the Marriot Sisters and Ben Aflac.  Many more came because both they and I had mis-spelled it as “Help, I’m a Celebrity . . .” (sic).

-monthly traffic increased more than 400%.

Over a thousand people (impossible to estimate anymore due to aggregators) are reading every day about a field of law once described by the New York Times as “an arcane sub-specialty.”  Not even a specialty.

Special thanks to Ernie and Denise for encouragement and those critical early links.  Thanks to Bret for inspiring me and allocating to me the trademark.blog.us name.  Thanks to Nathan for writing those great tools.

At least three companies other than Overture appear to have purchased OVERTURE as a keyword on Google.  No one other than Google  appears to have purchased the keyword GOOGLE on Google.

At least one company other than Google appears to have purchased the keyword GOOGLE on Overture.  At least twelve companies other than Overture appear to have purchased the keyword OVERTURE on Overture.

Interesting fact pattern: New.net provides software that allows a browser to utilize ‘alternate root’ domain names (domain names that end in .video or .shop, for example, top level domains that have not been added to ‘true’ A root).  LavaSoft sells Ad-Aware (which it bills as ‘the morning -after pill for the Internet’) which allows a user to discover and remove ‘scumware’, ‘data mining software’ and other bad programs that have been installed, perhaps surreptitiously, on the user’s computer.  Ad-Aware identifies New.net’s software as badware and uninstalls it, allegedly crashing the user’s computer in the process.  New.net says that its software is not badware, and saying that it is constitutes false advertising, trade libel, and other things.  Here is the complaint filed in the Central District of California, via Bret’s Lextext.com site.

Transcript of WLWT of Cincinnati on ‘purse parties’ where suburban women sell counterfeit goods.  Two points that purse-party attendees tend not to be aware of: (1) selling counterfeit goods is a federal crime; and (2) the proceeds of counterfeit goods sales often benefit organized crime.