American Airlines Sues Yahoo Over Keyword Advertising

On October 17, 2008, American Airlines filed a complaint in the Texas Northern District Court against Yahoo alleging trade-mark infringement. American Airlines claims that Yahoo is confusing potential customers and diverting them to competitors, by selling to third parties American Airlines' marks as keywords that trigger the appearance of "sponsored links". American Airlines began a similar lawsuit against Google in 2007 that the parties later settled. Although paid advertisements no longer appeared when certain American Airlines marks were searched via the Google service, American Airlines did not receive any monetary recovery as part of the settlement. It is interesting to note that, unlike Google, Yahoo's policy is to only allow advertisers that resell the products or services of the trade-mark owner to use trade-marks to trigger sponsored links. Internationally, keyword advertising lawsuits against search engines have had mixed results. The most recent decisions in the US have generally found there is no trade-mark infringement because consumers will not be confused so long as the trade-mark does not appear in the advertisement. By contrast, a number of European Courts have found keyword advertising to be misleading, resulting in positive decisions for the trade-marks owners. For the Associated Press article follow this link: http://tinyurl.com/5a6yve Summary by: Cheryl Cheung