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224 Part 1 Introduction

Box 4.5 Who owns the term ‘sport court’

This case involved two competitors who manufacture synthetic sports flooring. In
2002, Sport Court sued Rhino Sports for trademark infringement, and the parties
settled with a permanent injunction restricting Rhino Sports from ‘directly or indirectly
using in commerce the mark SPORT COURT. This injunction listed the digital assets or
advertising where this might occur: ‘on or in connection with the Internet, such as in
an Internet domain name, as a sponsored link, in connection with an Internet web page,
or as HTML code for an Internet website in any manner, such as the title or keyword
portions of a metatag, or otherwise’.
However, because of the broad matching facility in Google AdWords this didn’t
cover another activity which arose in 1996. Sport Court discovered that a Rhino Sports
ad appeared as a sponsored link in response to the search term ‘sport court’ (without
quotations) and went to court claiming that Rhino Sport was in contempt of the orig-
inal injunction. However, the ad copy didn’t contain the phrase ‘sport court’, and Rhino
Sports said it bought the broad-matched keyword terms ‘court’ and ‘basketball court’,
which triggered the ad. As a result, the complaint was rejected. Goldman explains:

First, the literal terms of the injunction only restrict using the term ‘Sport Court ... as
a sponsored link’. Arguably, invisible keyword triggering using ‘Sport Court’ wouldn’t
violate this provision. Second, Rhino Sports didn’t buy the keyword ‘Sport Court,’
and the injunction doesn’t restrict Rhino Sports’ purchase of generic terms like
‘court’ or ‘basketball court’.
This court’s reasoning is solid, but I’m interested by the fact that the court didn’t
discuss Rhino Sports’ ability to negative keyword match the phrase ‘sport court’. This
would be easy for Rhino Sports to do and it would appear to solve Sport Court’s
problem. Given that the court didn’t bail the plaintiff out here, plaintiffs drafting
injunctions may need to update their boilerplate injunction language to contemplate
the different technologies offered by the ad networks, both now and in the future.

Finally, since it was in court anyways, Rhino Sports took a stab at trying to modify the
injunction to let it buy the keyword ‘sport court’, like numerous other Sport Court
competitors are doing. Because the injunction was stipulated, the court wasn’t that
excited about disturbing the initial agreement.

Source: Goldman (2007)

D Accessibility law
Laws relating to discriminating against disabled users who may find it more difficult to use
Accessibility web sites because of audio, visual or motor impairment are known as accessibility legis-
legislation lation. This is often contained within disability and discrimination acts. In the UK, the
Legislation intended to relevant act is the Disability and Discrimination Act 1995.
protect users of web sites
with disabilities including Web accessibility refers to enabling all users of a web site to interact with it regardless
visual disability. of disabilities they may have or the web browser or platform they are using to access the
site. The visually impaired or blind are the main audience that designing an accessible web
site can help. Coverage of the requirements that accessibility places on web design are
covered in Chapter 7.
Internet standards organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium have been
active in promoting guidelines for web accessibility (www.w3.org/WAI). This site describes
such common accessibility problems as:
images without alternative text; lack of alternative text for imagemap hot-spots; misleading use
of structural elements on pages; uncaptioned audio or undescribed video; lack of alternative