Intellectual Property Lawyer

Dozier Intellectual Property Lawyer

Dozier Internet Law is a top rated law firm comprised of Internet lawyers with offices in Virginia, with a national and international practice.

You can find a wide range of articles, podcasts and videos on our main website dealing with copyright infringement, trademark infringement and related intellectual property issues. Here are some of John Dozier's thoughts relating to impression fraud and search term abuse when protecting your business trademark on the PPC search engines:

• Impression Fraud: This type of fraud comes from a competitor or someone marketing on its behalf. Almost all of the quality search engines use algorithms to present ads. Simplified dramatically, a good explanation is that your bid and your ad click rate determine presentation order. It is not a mere coincidence that this approach generates maximum revenue for the search engine. Your competitors can drive down your ad popularity (click rate) by generating a huge volume of automated searches for your key terms but never clicking on your ad. This drops your popularity, which allows your competitor to bid lower but get a higher ad ranking because you competitor disabled his/her own ads when running the "impression attack." Don't think, however, that you can necessarily figure out who is doing this by finding the competitor whose ads have been disabled. Affiliate marketers will run these attacks against you, other competitors and even their own client.
• Search-term Abuse: This is not the trademark infringement issue concerning a competitor buying up your name as a keyword or search term for PPC. This is about non-competitors running programs to identify search terms that are popular, buying the PPC advertising in bulk from search engines and using your company name in its main advertising title. My law firm had a leading and well respected technology search engine doing just that against us. It's false advertising, at a minimum, but a quick call to the CEO resolved the matter for us. However, it may not resolve the issue for others being targeted in this way. The other problem is, in fact, the search engines themselves. It used to be the only ads presented were based upon the search terms selected. At least one major search engine is presenting PPC ads based upon some ill-advised algorithm that identifies likely ads of interest to the party searching. Thus, one client had all of its competitors' ads being presented when users searched the name of the client, even when none of the competitors had purchased the terms.

I am reminded of the story about the lion's prey waking up in Africa every morning. It doesn't have to be the fastest in the pack to live another day - just not the slowest. The message for you is that you don't have to shut down the fraudsters. Just stay on top of things and get them to pick on someone else!

Intellectual Property Lawyer for Web Business

Dozier Internet Law is a pre-eminent and top rated (AV) intellectual property lawyer law firm and is the largest intellectual property lawyer attorney in the world specializing exclusively in the law of the Internet. We represent Internet business interests as an intellectual property lawyer.

CV, BV and AV are registered certification marks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used in accordance with the Martindale-Hubbell certification procedures, standards and policies. The information on this site is not intended to constitute legal advice and communication via email, telephone, or in writing with an attorney does not constitute the creation of an attorney-client relationship until a formal, written legal retainer agreement is signed. We rarely set forth case results on this site because of lawyer ethics considerations. Sometimes we will link to a decision involving our law firm. Whatever the reference to legal results in a particular matter, please understand that case and matter results depend upon a variety of factors unique to each such case or matter, and prior case or matter results do not predict or guarantee a similar result in future cases or matters. John W. Dozier, Jr. is the responsible attorney for this website, which is Attorney Advertising. A legal ethics requirement is that we state the following: CASE RESULTS DEPEND ON A VARIETY OF FACTORS UNIQUE TO EACH CASE, AND PRIOR CASE RESULTS DO NOT PREDICT OR GUARANTEE A SIMILAR RESULT IN FUTURE CASES. Our refund policy is to refund all remaining fee deposits at the end of the month of a file closing.

Remember, you can visit the main Dozier Intellectual Property Lawyer Website for more information.

(c) Copyright 2001-2009. All Rights Reserved. Dozier Internet Law, P.C.