The homepage of Taxes.com, which gives access to tax negotiation experts, currently refers three times to rival tax assistance business JK Harris, located at JKHarris.com. In two places, it states: “We Are NOT JK Harris - Visit Their Site Here” and provides a hyperlink. Another link on the homepage is to an article entitled "Wall St. Journal Reports JK Harris Raided by IRS".
Internal pages on the Taxes.com site make further references and link to the JK Harris site, mostly repeating that Taxes.com is “NOT JK Harris”. Today, the fourth and fifth results of a Google search on “JK Harris” both link to the Taxes.com site.
JK Harris sued, citing 75 references to its name on the Taxes.com site, which it argued were responsible for leading JK Harris customers to the web site of its rival. Its lawyers describe the practice as “creating keyword density”.
Other web sites have been ordered by courts to remove hidden references to rivals’ trade marks. These orders have concerned the abuse of meta tags, hidden HTML code which is read by search engines to identify the nature of web pages.
However, the preliminary court order against Steven Kassel, who operates Taxes.com, is possibly the first court decision of its kind. The ruling concerns the search performance of a web site’s primary content, not its hidden content, in circumstances where visitors to a site are clearly informed that it is unconnected with a rival.
A lawyer representing JK Harris is quoted by legal journal The Recorder:
“What is so revolutionary about this opinion is it expands the enjoinment of initial-interest-confusion practices on the internet to other practices such as the excessive use of the person’s trade name.”
The trial will consider further allegations that the comments on the Taxes.com site amount to defamation or trade libel, in addition to allegations of false advertising and intentional interference with contractual relations.