Take one competition style website based in Sheffield and take one huge corporation called Sony BMG! What do they have in common? Not a lot, except they’re currently showing ads that are triggered on a search for our trademark in Google. Now the Google rules might have changed, but hey there’s nothing wrong in asking those involved to politely stop – at least at first.

Now which company do you think would make the effort to reply? You’d be surprised but in fact Sony BMG managed to do what Win4Now (both the affiliate manager and the general enquiries email) have so far failed to do – and that’s reply!

Sony BMG told us that they actually don’t have our trademark in their list of keywords and were baffled why their Ida Maria website was appearing – up until that point they’d never heard of us! They said they’d investigate and contact Google!

There does seem to be something ‘odd’ with Google relevancy as why the hell would OTDS Ltd want to be appearing on searches for a competition site?

For any merchant to bid on one of their affiliate’s trademark is in my opinion a bit low. I don’t think it’s a “mystery” (as in the other two cases) as the landing page for the Win4Now ad has the word “competitors” in the tag – in other words they’ve targeted the keyword.

As they’ve not replied to emails, Win4Now links have been removed from Loquax – and will stay off whilst they use our trademark as a trigger. A merchant-affiliate relationship needs to be “joy joy happy” on both sides, and at the moment it isn’t!

Looks like we better keep an eye on those Teletext’s Trademark Trigger Legal Proceedings with added interest.

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