Playboy v Netscape 2

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Friday, January 16. 2004

Playboy v Netscape 2

Mr. Battelle, get a little deeper. The suit between Playboy and Netscape is far from a nuisance. It illustrates a continuation of some of the twisted business model values that plagued and then caused the dot-com crash.

Battelle writes "The question here is of balance. Where and how do you draw the line as to what is a misuse of a trademark, and what is not? If we have to depend on the courts every time someone wants to use a word that also happens to be trademarked, the chilling effect on paid search could be significant. "

The point is that defendants' use of the trademark was in commerce, and they enjoyed an economic benefit.

Further, The question is not necessarily of balance, but of value. As the holder of the mark, Playboy's position is no different than other mark holders that are far more agressive in their enforcement, such as Gucci. Trademark value preservation is the goal, value erosion is what Playboy wants to prevent. This is really only the tip of the iceberg of current search engines' erosion of value.

Google is a de facto 'content aggregator' in their cache page. Do content originators and owners enjoy a value benefit from the cache? Some would argue the answer is no, and Google's cache is copyright assumption without the permission of the holder. Cached pages are full of trademarks and copyrighted material that benefit Google most of all, and uless checked diminish copyright, trademark, and content owners intrinsic equity in their assets. The fact that content holders must opt-out of the cache is not the way copyrights work.

The value proposition get worse when one begins factoring in Yahoo and Google's product search offerings unveiled in the last couple of quarters. In these offerings, both companies mine the web for product image, description and content for service up to their users. The result is a) product search users get a new version of an on-line catalog, this being Yahoo's or Google's version; and b) can winnow their results by the picture/short description/price the bot was able to parse out. Users get this abbreviated set of data, and are able to quickly get to the lowest-priced offering. This is of course the Google - Yahoo kiss of death for mom and pop e-commerce sites, since the resulting price compression benefits only the customer, the search engine that served the results up, and marketers that enjoy high-volume low margin business models.

Posted by viavr in Internet at 12:23 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)
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