Recruitment agency Reed Executive plc and another sued
publishers Reed Business Information Ltd. and others, which had
moved into the on-line recruitment market with the totaljobs.com
venture. The site used the “Reed” mark on-line as part of their
names and logos in the site’s copyright notice and also as a meta
tag for the site.
Reed Executive plc argued that its internet traffic had dropped
after totaljobs.com went on-line as a result of the appearance of
totaljobs.com’s banner ads in search results.
Uses of the trade mark on the web site had stopped by the time
the case came to trial – but Reed Executive plc argued that the
removal of the mark had been too slow and that goodwill had been
built up by the infringement and passing off. It added that the
word “Reed” remained in the source code and was still being picked
up by search engines.
The court considered that a search for “Reed jobs” or “Reed
recruitment” might well lead to the appearance of totaljobs.com or
a banner advertisement, but that was not because of inclusion of
the word “Reed”, but rather the search engine's treatment of
generic terms such as “jobs” or “recruitment”.
As such, there was nothing legally objectionable, even if the
user mistakenly thought that the result was connected to
“Reed”.
However, totaljobs.com had used the word “Reed” as a reserved
term with at least one search engine, and that would have triggered
totaljobs.com’s banner ad to be displayed.
According to the case report by Lawtel:
“The concept of using a mark in the course
of a trade was wide enough to cover an invisible use as a meta tag
in the source code as that invisible use became visible when
translated into a search result in the user's browser. It was a
question of whether the mark was used to suggest that the web site
should be treated in a manner appropriate to the way in which a web
site of the registered trade mark owner should be treated. Or, put
shortly, the use of the meta tag did not tell the truth about
[totaljobs.com].”
