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Utah Bans Keyword Advertising

Posted by CowboyNeal on Mon Apr 09, 2007 11:41 PM
from the end-of-the-line dept.
The Internet United States
Eric Goldman writes "Last month, Utah passed a law banning keyword advertising. Rep. Dan Eastman, the Utah legislator who sponsored the law, believes competitive keyword advertising is the equivalent of corporate identity theft, causing searchers to be (in his words) 'carjacked' and 'shanghaied' by advertisers. He also takes a swipe at the EFF, dismissing its critique of the law as 'criticism from the fringes.'"
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[+] Technology: Utah Rethinking Anti-Keyword Advertising Law 22 comments
Eric Goldman writes "Slashdot previously reported on Utah's recent law banning trademark-triggered keyword advertising. This week, a group of technology executives met with Utah legislators to discuss the law, and it looks like the legislature is rethinking its position. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, 'Legislative leaders are looking to tweak a troublesome trademark protection program rather than defend it in court, after an unprecedented meeting with Internet power brokers who would prefer the new registry be scrapped.'"
[+] News: Utah Trying To Restrict Keyword Advertising ... Again 257 comments
Eric Goldman writes "The Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but does help trademark owners suppress their online competition."
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  • Damn Straight! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PixieDust (971386) on Monday April 09 2007, @11:48PM (#18671561)
    Because God knows that if I'm searching for "New Cars" I damn sure don't want to see any advertisements about car dealerships, finance companies, or anythign like that. Hell I don't even want results returning cars stuff. Why cant they just give me my sex in a new car porn and be done with it?!

    Stupid advertisers.

    Seriously, wtf is wrong with this picture?

    • Re:Damn Straight! (Score:5, Funny)

      by jlindy (1028748) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:09AM (#18671723)

      Seriously, wtf is wrong with this picture?
      Umm...Utah?
        • So you would be OK if Microsoft purchased all searches for RedHat, SuSe, Ubuntu, Mac, etc.... And every time you tried to search for any of those Items in any search engine you got nothing but links to Microsoft Vista? This law only protects Registered trade marks. This kind of redirection from one brand to another only happens when someone at the search engine has told the search engine that RedHat, Suse, Ubuntu = Microsoft.

          That's ridiculous and shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation. We're talking about keyword ads, not search results. If you Google for Red Hat you'll still find www.redhat.com, www.fedora.org, blah, etc. in the top search results, regardless of what ads Microsoft buys.

          Besides which, I don't think Google makes it possible for one company to buy every position in the "ads" area to the right of the screen. I've certainly never seen the same company's ad repeated twice in that section. So presumably if MS did buy a keyword ad, their ad would just appear *alongside* anybody else's ads for that keyword... including Red Hat, Inc. if they chose to buy one.

    • Re:Damn Straight! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sumdumass (711423) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:12AM (#18671751) Journal
      I think the idea is that if your searching for "Sam's Used Cars" you get get a bunch of links going to "Bill's Car and Plumbing Shop" before you get what you were looking for.

      • Thanks! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:25AM (#18671813)
        I didn't know that going to google.com was like going to the Oracle at Delphi. A spiritual endevour to commune with raw, unaldulterated universal truth. I was under the horribly mistaken impression that google built, maintained an operated a tool that many people found useful, and all they asked as payment was their users left over attention. That leftover attention then being sold to those who might find such vast quantities of unused attention valuable. Thank you for disabusing me of this notion, and helping me realize that google, is akin to a public service. God forbid that a person going into someone else's place of buisness be subjected to offers from affiliated businesses. I much prefer the Mormon position of people being denied adaquate legal healthcare in a commercial health establishment based on particular whims related to imagined magic.

          • Because illiterate tools are what /. is all about: (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2007, @02:31AM (#18672321)
            "Specifically, the law creates a new intellectual property right called an "electronic registration mark," defined as a "word, term, or name that represents a business, goods, or a service."

            This is a law which hopes to prevent businesses, especially those who made a useful tool to aggregate left over attention, from telling interested people about competing offers and businesses. This law is quitiscentially unAmerican in the sense that it's opposed to the free exchange of ideas, and to obtaining a competative advantage. It's positively feudal, and anyone who for a moment entertains a notion of legitimacy of such a law should be shot with a musket. Think of what the people get, the for the low low price of momentary curiosity which they may or may not act on a free useful tool, rather a variety of them, and a snap-shot of competing offers. The public domain of ideas belongs, wait for it you malignant asshat, the PUBLIC. Considering the fantastic deal the public is getting, via free sweet tools, ceeding yet another area of the public market place of ideas to dipshits that appearently give money to Mormon whores (the bad kind), those dipshits owe us all one motherfucking assload of everlasting awesome. A cure for cancer, cheap fusion power, something really magnificent for a new dominion over what we already collectively own: The knowledge that Plumber Bob is a plumber, and Dan's Plumbing offers the same services, maybe better, and maybe at better prices.

            Ignorance is not a virtue, and the idea that a privaleged few should be able to force it on the larger world is truly insane.
            • By the sound of it, it doesn't actually ban keyword advertising, it just limits a bit.

              Returning Bob's Hardware in a search for 'Dan's Hardware' based off from the word 'hardware' might be ok. 'hardware' is a rather generic word, after all. Walmart buying a link based off of 'Target', 'Sears', or 'K-Mart' would not be.

              Still, I could easily see this law being struck down by a judge with a wide interpretation of the 1st, as long as no actual misrepresentation is made.

    • Re:Damn Straight! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2007, @01:25AM (#18672129)
      Before you dismiss these laws, read these posts discussing the problem and the legality:

      http://senatesite.com/blog/2007/04/guest-blog-utah -trademark-protection.html [senatesite.com]
      http://senatesite.com/blog/2007/04/constitutionali ty-of-trademark.html [senatesite.com]

      This issue isn't as simple as the Slashdot hordes may make it seem.

      • Re:Damn Straight! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by baeksu (715271) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @03:52AM (#18672665)

        Thank you for the links, those were an interesting read.

        I still think that these legislation is not wise.

        First, I do not think it is the job of the state to protect the success or effectiveness of a private entity's pr-campaign.

        Second, this type of legislation would put a burden on the sellers of advertisement space. Would they have to verify the legal owner of each possible trademark that a keyword could refer to?

        The link uses the example 'pontiac', and how it should point to General Motors website. What about 'pontac', 'pontiac dealership' or 'pontiac repairs'? It quickly becomes very difficult to draw the line on where the rights of a trademark owner end, and free competition for eyeballs begins.

      • How to comply (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sfraggle (212671) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @10:13AM (#18675973)
        Suggestion to Google on how to comply with these laws: add the ability for trademark owners to disable targetted advertising to their trademark, as the law requires. However, do it by completely removing that trademark from the search index. Anyone searching for that trademark should get a blank page. We'll see how many companies really make use of this feature. If you don't want to play fair, you should take your toys and go home, I say.
    • I think the article was talking about key words that are trademarked being bought by a company that does not own the trademarks. Your example of a car dealership would not apply because a Toyota dealer sells Toyotas, etc. I don't think anyone has a problem with that. But, what if you ran a small grocery store that delivers online in your neighborhood and Walmart moved in and bought up all of the searches for your store on Google. Your competitor is really stealing your brand recognition that you spent many years building. Is this fair?

      • Re:Damn Straight! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tony Hoyle (11698) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Tuesday April 10 2007, @06:31AM (#18673247) Homepage
        bought up all of the searches for your store on Google

        How are they going to do that exactly? Bribe Google programmers to always return 'walmart' in a search for your store?

        All google does is put a well marked advertising link at the top or right of the search. Your store will still be returned as normal by google.

        If you don't like it, pay google for advertising.

    • No, you miss the point (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kripkenstein (913150) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @02:36AM (#18672345) Homepage

      Because God knows that if I'm searching for "New Cars" I damn sure don't want to see any advertisements about car dealerships, finance companies, or anythign like that.
      No, that isn't the issue at all. You have apparently not bothered to read TFA (I know, I must be new here). Keyword advertising is 100% legal after this bill; anyone and everyone can advertise using keywords like "New Cars". No problem there.

      The issue the Utah legislators are against is (the following example is fictitious) Sony buying keyword advertisements for the "XBOX" keyword - in hopes of getting them to buy PS3s instead. The idea behind the law is that, in this example, Microsoft own the XBOX trademark, and by Sony buying ads for "XBOX", they are 'benefiting from another person's trademark'. Or something like that. To be more specific, it might be the case the Sony pay more, and people typing "XBOX" see ads for Sony, and not Microsoft. The legislators see that as "hijacking a trademark".

      Now, this is an interesting issue. In essence, this is a case of one entity making use of anothers' trademark for profit. Which does seem a little 'off', at least if you value trademarks (I do, and I disvalue copyright and patents, at least in their current incarnation in the US). However, as pointed out in the past, the real issue isn't what is 'fair', but what is possible. Implementing this law is a lesson in futility. In other words, Utah don't get it. But they are not the complete morons implied by most people's reaction to the Slashdot title for this story.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tony Hoyle (11698)
        The issue the Utah legislators are against is (the following example is fictitious) Sony buying keyword advertisements for the "XBOX" keyword - in hopes of getting them to buy PS3s instead. The idea behind the law is that, in this example, Microsoft own the XBOX trademark, and by Sony buying ads for "XBOX", they are 'benefiting from another person's trademark'. Or something like that. To be more specific, it might be the case the Sony pay more, and people typing "XBOX" see ads for Sony, and not Microsoft. T

      • Consider -- a state stupidly votes through a law that might kneecap Google's earnings. The champion of the law even insults the EFF.

        Looks like a typical case of Microsoft removing a competitor's oxygen supply. It is not a conspiracy since Msoft are documented as astroturfers [google.com]...

        You might be right in arguing "Never assume malice if it can be explained by stupidity" -- but in today's world even Utah law makers should have more insight.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by MindStalker (22827)
      No the bill bans linking competitors when there is a trademark. As in if I search for Toyota I should never see any ads except for Toyota. Google was sued about this and won, so the federal standard is the competitors trademarks are legit for keyword ads. Except in Utah now....

  • Great... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZxCv (6138) on Monday April 09 2007, @11:51PM (#18671581) Homepage
    Because passing a stupid law like this in Utah will actually have any real effect on the use of keyword advertising.

    The only real effect it will have is making things harder for advertising companies, by forcing them to filter out the dolts in Utah before serving up an ad.

    This is nothing more than some 2-bit politician trying to make a name for himself, and won't do any good whatsoever for any of the citizens that were responsible for putting his sorry ass in office in the first place.
  • Utah. Politics. Internet.

    ZZZzzzzz......

    • Tune in to next week's installment of "Adventures in Utah" - you never know what those wacky Mormons are going to do next! Will they fight off evil by taking away its beer, or will the sight of a boobie in Manti bring about the apocalypse? Find out in next week's hilarious episode!

  • But then... (Score:3)

    by bennomatic (691188) on Monday April 09 2007, @11:57PM (#18671611) Homepage
    ...how is SCO going to sell more licenses?

  • Dumb Idea, Even Dumber Execution (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MaceyHW (832021) <maceyhw@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:06AM (#18671691)
    This ridiculous combination of horrendous policy, tortured understanding of technology, and regulatory sophistication boggles the mind. The best part is, rather than attack keyword advertising directly, the law creates an entirely new form of IP, the 'electronic registration mark':

    Specifically, the law creates a new intellectual property right called an "electronic registration mark," defined as a "word, term, or name that represents a business, goods, or a service." . . . Once registered, an infringement occurs if another person "uses an electronic registration mark to cause the delivery or display of an advertisement for a business, goods, or a service: (i) of the same class, as defined in Section 70-3a-308, other than the business, goods, or service of the registrant of the electronic registration mark; or (ii) if that advertisement is likely to cause confusion between the business, goods, or service of the registrant of the electronic registration mark and the business, goods, or service advertised."
    Luckily, the system is so loosely defined and, as TFA points out, directly in conflict with existing federal trademark law that it can't possibly stand. Apparently state legislators in Utah are available on the cheap, because I can't imagine the anti-keyword lobby has deep pockets. Maybe I can get some of this money, if only there were some way to cheaply deliver ads to this small group and only the small group...

  • I'm so torn (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:07AM (#18671701)
    I hate politicians, but I hate advertisers, too. Ack! (head explodes)

  • Google can cope easily (Score:4, Funny)

    by auroran (10711) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:10AM (#18671731)
    They have already proven they can handle themselves with difficult governments.

    First Google China edition
    Now Google Utah edition.

  • Quick! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:16AM (#18671777)
    So, who will be first to purchase AdWords for "Dan Eastman?"

    I just googled him and got no advertisements, so looks like he's even cheaper than the average politician!

  • There is a reason... (Score:4, Funny)

    by stox (131684) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:17AM (#18671779) Homepage
    Utah is one of the places used to simulate Mars landings.

  • Could be worse (Score:4, Funny)

    by EvanED (569694) <evaned&gmail,com> on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:21AM (#18671793)
    Rep. Dan Eastman...believes competitive keyword advertising is the equivalent of corporate identity theft, causing searchers to be (in his words) 'carjacked' and 'shanghaied' by advertisers.

    Well, at least he's not appropriating the name of an entire city to make his point.

  • My two explanations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by michaelmalak (91262) <malak@acm.org> on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:28AM (#18671831) Homepage
    This is so obviously wrong the reasons it is wrong may not be obvious, so here is my attempt at three concise explanations:
    1. Old-fashioned thinking says that Google is the new newspaper. This is wrong. It's the new concierge. If you go to a hotel and ask the concierge for reservations to Morton's and he says, "ah, but here is a better steakhouse that my buddy runs" -- can you imagine that being illegal?
    2. Old-fashioned thinking says that the world is hierarchical. That's just post-Aristotle Western thinking. According to this new Utah law, if you want to find competitors to Jiffy Lube, you must first identify the superclass or super superclass (species and genus, respectively, in Aristotalean terms) and type that into the search engine. Typing in a specimen (i.e. Jiffy Lube) to find siblings is called associative lookup in computer science parlance. I'm wondering when the law is coming that bans content addressable memory.
    3. Old-fashioned thinking says that there is a bright line between paid and unpaid search engine placement. Even if an advertiser is not paying for Google AdWords, you know they're paying for search engine optimization -- just not directly to Google. Will SEO be the next thing made illegal, since it is a form of advertising that has no explicit "this message paid for by..." message? And if not, do we prefer SEO (i.e. Google spam pages) to AdWords?

      • Re:My two explanations (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rakishi (759894) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @01:11AM (#18672057)
        Then someone should tell that to the people who've been printing phone books for the last few decades. Or have you never actually opened up a nice thick paper phone book with its orgy of keyword based advertisements?

          • Re:My two explanations (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Telvin_3d (855514) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @03:31AM (#18672587)
            Yeah, but then again Google has never claimed to be the white pages. For that matter, their stated business model of making money off of people looking things up sounds a lot more like the yellow pages to me. Just because a legislator in Utah has decided that Google should act like public service/reference manual doesn't make it so.

  • This isn't much of a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ElForesto (763160) <elforesto@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:47AM (#18671957) Homepage
    ... at least for those of us living here in Utah. They've caught a bit of flak from members of the Bloghive in these parts, especially with the hackjob [senatesite.com] responses [senatesite.com] they've got going on. Of course, these are the same guys who tried to get a special E911 tax on VoIP [windley.com] and almost passed statewide franchise agreements [freeutopia.org], so you've got to know they're not entirely with it.

  • What did you expect? (Score:4, Funny)

    by novalogic (697144) <aramovaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:58AM (#18672003)
    Someone put an Adword in on google for "Douchebag" and it linked to http://www.daneastman.com/ [daneastman.com]

  • Interstate commerce (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iamacat (583406) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @01:33AM (#18672159)
    It has been horribly overused and corrupted, but surely laws pertaining to Internet have to be decided on national or, better, international level. With 50 states passing conflicting laws, soon no employee of a tech company will be able to travel across state lines without risk of arrest.

  • bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nanosquid (1074949) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @01:37AM (#18672161)
    The Utah legislators are confusing trademarks with owning a word. The purpose of a trademark is to identify a product uniquely, not to give a company control of a word.

    Advertising a competing product when potential customers search for a trademark is exactly what trademarks were supposed to accomplish.

    • Re:bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brickwall (985910) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @03:15AM (#18672509)
      Advertising a competing product when potential customers search for a trademark is exactly what trademarks were supposed to accomplish.

      How the heck did this get modded informative? Trademarks were established so that the time and effort a company spends establishing its brand won't get hijacked by someone offering a substandard product with the same name. How useful would it be if you went to the store to get "Aspirin", and there were 10 different versions with the same name, but half of them were weaker and less effective products? Yes, you can always read the ingredients but look at a can of generic corn vs., say, Del Monte. I've found through experience that the Del Monte version is always crisper and sweeter (meaning it was probably canned more quickly from fresher corn) than the generic version. However, both labels will read "corn, water, salt". If the generic maker was able to copy Del Monte's tradename, buying canned corn would be a crapshoot.

      Now, you may say "canned corn, big deal", but what if the "Michelin" tires you paid for were actually retreads or substandard tires? Not only do you get ripped off by paying the premium price, but I don't really want to risk a blowout at 60 mph.

      There is a ton of marketing research - from both ad firms and university professors - that shows that brand names are useful to consumers. The brand provides information and assurance about a certain level of consistency and quality to the consumer. For example, having tried Hunt's, Aylmer, and generic ketchup, I'll stick to Heinz. I have tried some generic products (e.g. hot dogs - for some reason I have food on the brain tonight!) that I find perfectly acceptable to their brand name versions. Here's another - I take a generic version of metformin to help control my diabetes; it's less than half the price of the brand name version, and it works perfectly well. But I've also tried many generic products (rough toilet paper, inferior laundry detergent, lousy frozen food to name a few) that were completely disappointing.

      But those are inexpensive products where the cost of testing them is a few bucks. When I upgrade to an HDTV, it's going to be a Toshiba or Sony or Samsung or LG; it's not going to be an Avanti. When I spend $2,000, I want the assurance of a brand name (quality, warranty, likelihood the maker will be around in five years).

      That's what brand names are supposed to accomplish, not to make it easier for competitors. Sheesh!

      • Re:bullshit (Score:4, Informative)

        by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @06:50AM (#18673361) Homepage
        Well, partially, but the other big reason to have trademarks is to protect consumers. If you go to the store to get corn, and the various sources (i.e. businesses) from which the corn comes are identified -- Del Monte, Green Giant, etc. -- then you can expect that all corn with a particular trademark on it always comes from the same source, and will have basically consistent quality levels (whether good or bad). Other people cannot label their corn as coming from one of their competitors. By enforcing trademark protections, consumers can avoid being tricked in the marketplace.

        But even if you want to discourage one business freeloading off of the commercial reputation that another business has laboriously established, and even if you want to ensure that like-branded goods are of like quality so that consumer expectations will be met, this does not mean that competitors cannot use each others' trademarks under the right circumstances! This is still a stupid law in that it is tragically short-sighted.

        For example, suppose I grow corn, and unlike my competitors, I still use the time-tested method of waiting to harvest until I can rent an elephant and verify that the corn reaches eye-height. It is not an infringement or dilution for me to advertise that I do this and that my competitors, who I mention by name, do not. You see this all the time in product comparisons where actual products are mentioned instead of silly workarounds like 'Brand X' or whatever. It's called a nominative use, and it is legal.

        But apparently not under this law! Utah doesn't think that if someone searches for Del Monte that Green Giant cannot leap into the fray and claim (if it's true) that their corn is better. Likewise, a grocery store can't advertise that they carry Del Monte, which is kind of important given that they don't seem to distribute directly from the canning plant to the dinner table. That's another nominative use.

        There may also be difficulties with trademark fair use (which is a confusingly named but totally separate doctrine from the more well-known copyright fair use doctrine) which permits everyone to use words which happen to be trademarks in their non-trademarked capacity. For example, Apple is a trademark for computers, but apple is not a trademark for the fruit of the same name. If you search for 'apple,' and Google ignores case as pretty much everyone on the Internet must, then there's nothing wrong with the apple farmers buying up all the ads. But would this be allowed under this law? I'd be worried about it, and that alone isn't very good. Particularly given that if everyone passes or doesn't pass, their own version of this, it creates a patchwork of regulation and now I have to check all over the place.

        Frankly, aside from not surviving on its merits, I predict that the Interstate Commerce Clause will kill this in court since it makes it too difficult for businesses to engage in commerce nationwide. If people really want this -- and I think it's not a very good idea -- then it would be more appropriate to get Congress to do it. States should not.

    • Re:bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

      by asninn (1071320) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @03:29AM (#18672579)
      Really? I thought the purpose of trademarks was to allow you to build a brand identity without people freeloading off of your good name - for example, if you create a new drink and call it, oh, "Coca-Cola", then others aren't allowed to create cheap/inferior versions and also calling them "Coca-Cola" in order to trick people into thinking that what they're buying is your product, thus hurting your business when those people are dissatisfied with the drink's quality.

      Of course that doesn't mean that advertising competing products when people search for trademarked names should be illegal (in fact, the very idea that it should be is so whacky that I'm not surprised that this is from Utah of all places), but I don't think being able to advertise competing products is the *purpose* of trademarks or the reason why they were created.

  • Some types of keyword ads should be stopped (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vux984 (928602) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @04:06AM (#18672717)
    There's keyword advertising, and there's keyword advertising. I don't have an issue with google showing sponsored ads off to the side... but not embedded within the results.

    But the greatest scum of all keyword adverts is in the vein of 'gator' et al, that rewrote webpages and literally embedded ads for competitors right within a businesses own website's content - a least from the end user experience perspective.

    The new 'gator' is that 'intellitext' crap, and frankly its just as bad, perhaps worse because its coming from the website instead of being the result of malware I can remove. (Sure I can generally block intellitext crap with FF using adblock with some effort, but that's beside the point.)

    I hate playing 'dodge the link with my mouse' with 'legitimate' website content, blogs, and so forth. I would support a law that banned that sort of page rewriting to embed advertising links.

    I've never met a user that found those ads anything but annoying. (Especially on older systems where running the javascript and building the popup would take several seconds, like my old G3 ibook, a delay triggered by simply letting the mouse glide over a link by mistake... not click on it, just drift over it)

  • Free Ringtones (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rodney dill (631059) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @06:36AM (#18673279) Journal
    If you've ever tried to find true "Free Ringtones" you'll probably have an idea of the frustration that lead to this sort of law. It took me along time to identify Audacity 123 software, QualComm Purevoice software, BitPIM software, and a data cable as a means to create real free ringtones for my phone. Virtually every link to free ringtones had you buying a service are getting "free" ringtones only if you signed on to buy others. This is false advertising, and is an area that makes the internet useless. Again that what make the Internet the most useful (powerful search and association capability) brings it to its news for some intended purposes. Just banning the use of the word free in advertising would help. Though this would probably be impossible to implement and enforce.

  • What about comparison ads? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna (970587) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @06:41AM (#18673309) Journal
    There are hundreds and hundreds of advertisements that go out every day in every media where they specifically identify their competitor and bash them in their ads. Like in, "Acme Garage changes oil for 9.99$, Superior Garage charges 19.99$". There are store brands of products that mimic a copytighted product. For example, the store brand mouth wash Equate specifically says, "Same active ingredient as in Scope(R)TM". Why leave them all out and bring only the electronic ads into the purview of the law?

    • Re:Follow the money to here... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Technician (215283) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @01:10AM (#18672053)
      Which campaign donor paid for this, or which Mormon edict is behind it? It's obviously one or the other.

      I think you might be onto something here.. It looks like follow the money. Now if I can find some data on the new registery mentioned in the article and who profits...

      Snipped from the article....

      Owners of eligible words can register the terms in a new registry by paying a nominal fee.
    • You know what they say... regulating the internet is like teaching a pig to sing - it wastes your time and annoys the internet.

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