The recent brouhaha over Google taking down a Susan Collins ad which mentions MoveOn.org raises some really interesting questions. First, why would the USPTO grant a Trademark to an organization that does not engage in commerce? Is “trade” in ideas, the overwhelming majority of which are political ideas, the kind of activity that should lend itself to a Trademark?

Google’s stated reason for the takedown is that Google has a policy which allows any Trademark owner to request that ads not be run which reference their mark. There are a couple of examples in the comments to Google’s “blog” post which point out why this would be a troublesome policy when applied to commercial marks that are in fact used in commerce. But given that MoveOn.org traffics purely in political ideas, how is this policy apposite? It seems to me that there needs to be another kind of mark that could be used by such an organization which would protect them from others using the same mark to proffer ideas into the marketplace of ideas, but that would not trigger the policy applied in this case which has had the seemingly wrong effect of stopping persons affected by MoveOn.org’s activites referencing their protagonist by name in the principal forum which is used to convey such ideas today, advertising.

The avowedly innocent application of a “policy” in this case, where it does not really apply, has to make one wonder whether Google isn’t secretly pleased with the outcome. It is a good reason to use some other search engines from time to time to keep the market healthy, by which I mean, by keeping more than one search provider in business.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 11:04 pm MST and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.