Your Meta Tags Can Get You Sued

If you're responsible for your organization's Website, or if you're a cyber squatter (or thinking about becoming one) here are some key legal guidelines you should know about.

Website Information Isn't Free
Sure, you can visit a public Website for free, but if you copy portions of the content and use it as your own you are probably violating copyright law. A common misconception among the public and Web professionals alike is that "if it's on the Web, it's free to use." That's crazy. If you go to Microsoft's Website, you can't copy their logo and stick it on your Website unless you get Microsoft's permission to do so. If you find a dazzling photo of a Saguaro standing tall against the setting sun on someone's Website, you almost certainly have to pay for the right to use it.

Post Site Usage Rules On Your Site
To help protect the content on your own Website, it's good to have a terms and of use statement on your site. Look for these things on most Websites and you'll find them at the bottom of the page as a tiny link. Lawyers want them there though they admit that they are not foolproof in protecting you.

Trademarks Win Over Domain Names
Some people buy up domain names (potential Website addresses) hoping to sell them for big profits. The people who reportedly sold www.billgates.com, www.wallstreet.com and www.drugs.com for huge profits have become a part of Internet folk lore. They've also earned a new name -- Cyber squatters. Cyber squatters fall into two categories. One type is a person who buys a domain name – a Website address – such as "Desert Diamond Casino" in the hope that the Desert Diamond Casino itself will pay big bucks for the name. According to NetWork Solutions, the domain name "www.desertdiamondcasino.com" is owned by Ruby Kasper, who lives right here in Tucson. Last time we checked with Desert Diamond Casino, we were told that the Casino did not know who Ruby Kasper was.
     
Will the Desert Diamond Casino pay big bucks for the above-mentioned domain name? Only top management at the Casino knows what it will do, but case law suggests that the answer is, "NO."
     
One of the most famous cyber squatter case is about Dennis Toeppen and Panavision. Mr. Toeppen bought www.panavision.com. The Panavision folks sued him for trademark infringement and won because "Panavision" is trademarked. In court, it seems, a trademark is the highest trump card in the deck.
     
The second type of cyber squatter buys generic domain names – domain names that can't be trademarked – but can have great market place value. If you bought www.oatmeal.com, for example, maybe the Quaker Oats folks would want to buy it from you. In this example, you wouldn't have to worry about someone having a trademark on the word "oatmeal.."

Even Your Meta Tags Can Get You In Trouble
Meta tags, groups of words labeled things like "title," "keywords" and "description" are programming that is placed in the source code of a Web page – it's the programming that makes the page work but is invisible to the eye unless you tell your browser to show it to you.
     
How can meta tags get you in legal trouble? The simple answer is "trademark or copyright infringement." Here's an example. Let's say a Ollie's Office Supply Store opens and decides to compete online with the big boys of office supplies – Staples, Office Max and Office Depot. An overly eager programming approach to getting Website traffic would be to try to divert search-engine generated traffic to Ollie's by putting the names "Staples, Office Max and Office Depot" in Ollie's meta tags.
     
The idea would be that a search engine read the code and determine that Ollie's is related to Staples. Therefore, Ollie's comes up in the hit list for someone searching for Staples, and Ollie's gets traffic and sales. In the words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up.
    
Well, hey, if Staples or the other guys find out, chances are, Ollie's is going to get a cease and desist order. Those three names are trademarked. You may be thinking by now that you'd never do such an unscrupulous thing, and the fact that someone else would just boggles your mind. Sure. But take a minute to ask yourself who your competitors are and whether they might try to steal any business from you. If the answer is "maybe they would," then maybe you should ask your Website guru to check the source code on your competitor's sites just to make sure they have the same high integrity you do.

Jurisdiction Is a Heavy Duty Word
In the legal world, jurisdiction means which court gets to hear a case – or at least whether to decide whether to hear a case. Jurisdiction has big time repercussions when it comes to domain names, because if Staples decides Ollie's Office Supply Store isn't going to behave, no matter how many nasty letters the lawyers send, Staples may very well have to sue Ollie's in Ollie's back yard -- that is, in Ollie's jurisdiction.
     
In your case, if you're doing business in Tucson, but the person who is infringing on your copyrighted work or trademark is in Reston, Virginia, then you're probably going to have to pay lawyers in Virginia to go after the bad guy. Or maybe lawyers in both Arizona and Virginia. So while suing is usually no fun at all, jurisdictional issues can make suing even less fun still, and a lot more expensive, which is all the more reason to be careful as you go to avoid legal problems.

This article first appeared as a column written by Dave Tedlock, NetOutcomes' president, for Inside Tucson Business and/or the New Mexico Business Weekly.

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