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].”
