US Court Orders Company to Use Negative Keywords

A US court has ordered a firm to utilize negative adwords in their internet advertising. "Orion Bancorp took Orion Residential Finance (ORF) to court in Florida over ORF's use of the word 'Orion' in relation to financial services and products, arguing that it had used the term since 2002 and had held a trade mark for it since then. [...] The judge in the case went further, though, restraining ORF from 'purchasing or using any form of advertising including keywords or "adwords" in internet advertising containing any mark incorporating Plaintiff's Mark, or any confusingly similar mark, and shall, when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term "Orion" as negative keywords or negative adwords in any internet advertising purchased or used.'"

Orion, that's definitely a unique name....

[r_jensen11 (598210)]

Orion's overrated anyway. They should change their name to BoÃtes.

Re:Orion, that's definitely a unique name....

[wizardforce (1005805)]

fyi Bootes is a constellation with the giant void.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootes

Re:Orion, that's definitely a unique name....

[r_jensen11 (598210)]

Sorry, I should've probably also included a link [wikipedia.org]. However, one would expect that, of any websites, /. would support more than just basic latin characters....

Re:Orion, that's definitely a unique name....

[by Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect with Perl crap from the early 90s, you think they've heard of unicode and character encoding?

Who remembers (2:erocS)?

[tepples (727027)]

What do you expect with Perl crap from the early 90s, you think they've heard of unicode and character encoding?

Actually, yes they have. People were abusing left-to-right and right-to-left control characters [wikipedia.org] it to destroy the layout of Slashdot comment pages, including spoofing a comment's score. Open this comment [slashdot.org] and show the hidden replies to see an example of what was going wrong. So the developers modified the SLASH software to strip out all Unicode characters that aren't on a whitelist.

Orion Bankcorp: Crybabies

[writerjosh (862522)]

This is unfortunate. The courts should have no jurisdiction over someone's stupidity. Using the name "Orion" in your company name is just asking for trouble. It's such a popular and recognizable term. OB and ORF shouldn't be surprised when someone steps on their toes once in awhile. OB acts like it invented the term despite the fact that it's been around for thousands of years.

And then with the courts stepping in and forcing ORF to not use the term in their advertising is playing favorites to OB. I can only imagine that this decision puts a serious dent in ORF's bottom line. If ORF was calling themselves "Kleenex" or some other brand name, that would be understandable, but "Orion?" Come on. OB shouldn't be crying foul when they should've known there would be confusion with the name "Orion." They need to grow up and play ball the old fashion way: may the best man win.

Re:Orion Bankcorp: Crybabies

[JustOK (667959)]

Plus, everyone knows the Orion is a satire/parody website.

Re:Orion Bankcorp: Crybabies

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

"Orion" isn't the first term you'd use to describe a financial services company, though, and as soon as you use a non-descriptive word to identify your business you're in the realm of trademark law. Trademark law looks for risk of confusion, which is imaginable in this case. They shouldn't have been able to sue a business called "Orion candy", for example.

Nolo Press has a good book about trademarks, and one of the examples they give of a common word turning into a protectable trademark is "Diesel: a bookstore". "Diesel" is a pretty common word but uncommon when applies to bookstores.

Re:Orion Bankcorp: Crybabies

[thebdj (768618)]

If ORF was calling themselves "Kleenex" or some other brand name, that would be understandable

Actually, thanks to a little something known as genericized trademark [wikipedia.org], they actually wouldn't be in too much trouble if their name were Kleenex. It could be easily argued that Kleenex is genericized since the word is almost synonymous with tissues now. Trademark law works quite interesting in that manner. If you do not properly defend your mark and it becomes "generic" then your rights to the mark could be lost. (Now, if only we adopted a similar measure with Patents but that is a different story.)

Re:Orion Bankcorp: Crybabies

[DECS (891519)]

Anytime a trademark gets an indefinite article, it's in risk of being a common term.

Nobody is likely to ask a friend for "Kleenex," hoping to get a specific brand of tissue, but it is common to ask for "a kleenex," just as somebody might ask for "a bandaid."

People in various places also refer to "a frigidaire" or "a coke," and plenty of terms that started out as trademarks have been lost to common words: aspirin, cellophane, dumpster, escalator, nylon, linoleum, thermos, velcro, zipper.

Re:Bad precedent

[Tanktalus (794810)]

I doubt this sets any precedent. This is not new or novel or even unexpected. The only news for nerds here is the judge explicitly calling out search advertising. Otherwise, it's entirely predictable (the way laws and courts should be).

The Orions had both overlapping goods/services AND they had overlapping sales regions.

Golden Dragon restaurant in downtown L.A. does not compete with Golden Dragon in Manhattan. There is no confusion arising from the re-use of that name. Now, if there were a Golden Dragon *chain* restaurant, the rules may change. But not much. First come, first serve, as far as that trade mark and the area it is used in. You can't form a chain called "Golden Dragon restaurants" and try to push that Manhattan restaurant out (but you can try to buy it).

Its perfectly reasonable

[Zeinfeld (263942)]

There was a pretty clear claim for trademark infringement here. The court very reasonably found that ORF was trading on Orion's reputation.

Having made that finding the court is quite reasonably penalizing ORF. It is quite reasonable for an injunction to penalize ORF after they clearly took advantage of Orion's reputation.

And any company that does not show up in court when served with papers is likely to find that they end up saddled with onerous terms in any case.

Misinterpreting negative

[Bovius (1243040)]

When I first read the post, for some reason I thought "negative keywords" meant they had to advertise under keywords that people wouldn't want, like "really bad financial service" or "shady loan company" or "housing lemons".

My interpretations:

[Alzheimers (467217)]

1) Company must now register and pay for the keywords "Dummy", "Poopiehead", "Fartsniffer", and "Boogerbrains"

or

2) Company must now register keywords that, when combined with their intended keywords, nullify each other out, like Semantic anti-matter.

or

3) Company may only use keywords that have a value less than zero.

Re:Editors please Edit!

[travdaddy (527149)]

Do you realize how long this sentence is? Fine for court documents, but not for a casual news site.

It's fine, we're all very adept lawyers here.

Re:Editors please Edit!

[gbjbaanb (229885)]

ok. translation for the modern generation:

"you know dude, you been naughty. like stop it, k"

will that do ya?

Re:Editors please Edit!

[techpawn (969834)]

Translation:
The judge in the case went further, though, restraining
IF
restraining ORF from 'purchasing or using any form of advertising including keywords ||
('adwords' in internet advertising containing any mark incorporating Plaintiff's Mark &&
hall, when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term 'Orion' as negative keywords) ||
negative adwords in any internet advertising purchased or used.
END

I may need to debug that...

Re:Editors please Edit!

[popmaker (570147)]

I need a woman, NOW.

Well, if you REALLY want something incomprehensible, fine, go ahead.

Re:Editors please Edit!

[gnick (1211984)]

Do you realize how long this sentence is? Fine for court documents, but not for a casual news site.

Sometimes, due either to an attempt to communicate a complicated idea or the desire to expand on a simple idea ad nauseum for novelty purposes, a sentence will carry on for extended lines and, if properly authored by an individual using simple words and eschewing obfuscation, it will not necessarily be difficult for the general public to understand, even without the assistance of a lawyer, translator, or advanced Communications degree.

Re:Editors please Edit!

[SingerGuy59 (1279730)]

The magnitude of your copious assertion is far to sagacious for my diminutive comprehension.

Re:Editors please Edit!

[Hatta (162192)]

They're lucky that's the only long sentence given by the judge.

Re:Editors please Edit!

[zippthorne (748122)]

Legal rulings are like genie wishes (or is that the other way around...).

As soon as you hit the period, you get your wish. Usually corrupted in a horribly unforeseen way.

Re:Appeal in 3..2..1..

[jeiler (1106393)]

Under normal circumstances I'd agree completely, but since ORF didn't show up at court, their odds of winning an appeal are slim to none.

Re:I smell a Loop hole

[elb (49623)]

Forget RTFA, did you even read the original post?

"and shall, when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term 'Orion' as negative keywords or negative adwords in any internet advertising purchased or used".

the judge specifically said "internet advertising". and s/he used the phrase "keywords, adwords, or the like". to suggest that the ruling applies only to google adwords is flagrant trolling. i don't know how anyone could possibly interpret the statement in the ruling as being constrained to google.

sheesh. how this got modded "interesting" is beyond me.

I don't think so

[wsanders (114993)]

I mean, "apple" and "America" are pretty generic terms, but I suspect if I started a company called "Apple Microcomputers" and "Mortgage Bank of America" I'd get some phone calls real soon, and they wouldn't be from customers.

Ah well, they should just change their name to "YA Bankrupt Fly-By-Night Mortgage Broker" and be done with it.