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.