Legal Problems About Trademark Embedded In Meta-tags

As a symbolization of commodity or services, trademark's traditional role is to distinguish different sources of commodities or services. But with the development of social economy, trademark's role is not only to tell the sources of commodities or services, but advertisement and publicity, quality recognition. With the expansion of the function of trademark, its commercial value, also, strengthen, which bring about more trademark disputes. The development of e-commerce which originated in the hypothesized network environment, make trademark disputes more complex. In recent years, there have been lots of trademark disputes in the network environment such as:the domain name conflicts, keyword advertising, add box connection, and the use of trademarks in meta-tagsMeta-tags are descriptive words embedded in html code that website operator uses to describe the feature and contents of the website. Invisible on the webpage, generally, mate-tags will only be recognized by internet engines. The significance of information in Meta-tags for search engines are mainly embodied in:provide basis for establishing the keyword index for search engines; provide reference of rankings for search results. On this principle,many webmasters often embeds other well-known trademark or competitors' trademark in meta-tags, expecting, when network terminal user use trademark search target web site, his own website may be as a search results returned to network users, which may tempt network terminal users to their site, and so they can obtain trading opportunities. For trademark owner, this behavior will obviously produce adverse influence.China has not appeared this type of disputes, but, in line with the bud attitude, it is necessary to make a comprehensive introduction and analysis of this problem. What's more important, in the time of our country will revive our trademark law third time, its necessary to comprehensive study all kinds of legal issues arising in our life to improve it.This paper is divided into five parts, total wordThe first part introducing meta-tags technology, search engine technology, giving the definition, classification of embedding trademark in meta-tags, the influence of use trademarks in meta-tags.The second part based on the United States, Britain, Germany's related cases, Pointing out the question need to be discussed in dealing with embedding trademark in meta-tag are: the nature of embedding trademark in mate-tags"," the consequences of embedding trademark in mate-tags ", "legal which can apply to deal with problem of embedding trademark in mate-tags"The third part discussing the nature of the behavior embedding trademark in meta-tags can called use of trademark, firstly. Then, discussing outcomes of that behavior include: "distinguish the source of goods and services","confusion","association"; finally, based on the nature of the behavior embedding trademark in meta-tags, and result arising from that behavior, proposing that the behavior of embedding trademark in meta-tags can apply trademark law, unfair competition law.The fourth part pointing out that the dilemmas of apply trademark law to adjust embedding trademark in meta-tags under present trademark law of our country; pointing out that the dilemmas of apply anti-unfair competition law to adjust embedding trademark in meta-tag.The fifth part from the trademark law and anti-unfair competition law angle give improvement suggestions about adjustment embedding trademark in meta-tags...