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On Monday, the 11th circuit U.S. Appeals Court upheld an earlier verdict that says the use of trademarked terms in a meta-description tag can create confusion and thus be considered a trademark infringement.
The suit was filed by North American Medical Corp. (NAM) and Adagen Medical International against Axiom Worldwide Inc. and is known as North American Medial Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc.
NAM and Axiom compete against each other making and selling spinal decompression devices. The case revolves around the #2 placement Axiom achieved at Google under trademarked terms belonging to NAM, “Accu-Spina” and “IDD Therapy”. Those terms happen to be found in Axiom’s meta-description tag and are included in the descriptive-text that appeared under links in Google’s search results.
The decision rested on the court’s understanding (or misunderstanding) of how Google’s ranking algorithms operate with the plaintiff suggesting the defendant’s use of of their trademarks in their description tag was the reason the defendant’s website was pushed to the #2 position.
As pointed out by Eric Goldman who originally covered the story in his Technology and Marketing Law Blog,
