The homepage of Taxes.com, which gives access to tax negotiation
experts, currently refers three times to rival tax assistance
business JK Harris, located at JKHarris.com. In two places, it
states: “We Are NOT JK Harris - Visit Their Site Here” and provides
a hyperlink. Another link on the homepage is to an article entitled
"Wall St. Journal Reports JK Harris Raided by IRS".
Internal pages on the Taxes.com site make further references and
link to the JK Harris site, mostly repeating that Taxes.com is “NOT
JK Harris”. Today, the fourth and fifth results of a Google search
on “JK Harris” both link to the Taxes.com site.
JK Harris sued, citing 75 references to its name on the
Taxes.com site, which it argued were responsible for leading JK
Harris customers to the web site of its rival. Its lawyers describe
the practice as “creating keyword density”.
Other web sites have been ordered by courts to remove hidden
references to rivals’ trade marks. These orders have concerned the
abuse of meta tags, hidden HTML code which is read by search
engines to identify the nature of web pages.
However, the preliminary court order against Steven Kassel, who
operates Taxes.com, is possibly the first court decision of its
kind. The ruling concerns the search performance of a web site’s
primary content, not its hidden content, in circumstances where
visitors to a site are clearly informed that it is unconnected with
a rival.
A lawyer representing JK Harris is quoted by legal journal The
Recorder:
“What is so revolutionary about this opinion
is it expands the enjoinment of initial-interest-confusion
practices on the internet to other practices such as the excessive
use of the person’s trade name.”
The trial will consider further allegations that the comments on
the Taxes.com site amount to defamation or trade libel, in addition
to allegations of false advertising and intentional interference
with contractual relations.
