Creating a Slippery Slope

Monday, December 17th, 2007 | Search Engine Optimization

If I search myself on Google and find a cyber-gripe site about me and end up getting attacked because some crazy person found it and decided they wanted me dead – is Google also to blame because they indexed the site?

What if my biggest competitor runs an ad on prime time TV openly misleading the population about my company and product and sells the same thing with a typo’ed version of my product name – is CBS responsible?

I think we create a slippery slope when we are allowed to place blame, or cast a net of liability, regarding trademark infringement to search engines. The advertising and keywords that they put up are really just user-generated content when you boil it down – and more and more websites are insulating themselves from any liability whatsoever from user-generated content.

Just look at MySpace and your favorite networking sites. Simply saying – “But! Google (or MySpace) let me put it up! Why isn’t it their fault?” is not an excuse – my mom would say, if Google told you to jump off a bridge, would you?

On this issue, I stand on the side which feels that it’s up to businesses, and their representatives, to protect their brands, and feel that a reactive position by search engines with policies which remove the infringement, protect a trademark, and remove indexed pages from their cache is appropriate.

Web 2.0 is ALL about user-generated content and vamped up advertising platforms and I don’t think this issue (and the ones related to it) is going away any time soon.

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Tags: google, Keywords, MySpace, Networking Site, Search Engines, Trademark Infringement, Web 2.0

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