It’s still very early in the game when it comes to search engines and legal issues. Although a number of lawsuits have helped clarify things like appropriate content in meta tags and whether using trademarks is fair game, lots of other issues are still unclear and up in the air.
It’s important to understand these issues if you’re a search marketer, both to stay out of trouble and to know what recourse you have if someone poaches your intellectual content. A panel of legal experts discussed these issues on a recent Search Engine Strategies panel, and guest writer Grant Crowell caught the session, reporting on it in today’s SearchDay article, Copyrights, Trademarks and Search Engines.
A longer version of this story for Search Engine Watch members goes into more detail about various methods to protect your intellectual content, including how to safeguard images from being copied, and a checklist for taking action if you’ve found that your content has been stolen and illicitly used elsewhere on the web.