Namesafe Files Legal Complaint Against Lifelock

An interesting case arose today the legal issues of trademarks and search engine advertising. NameSafe, an identity protection company, sued LifeLock for bidding on their name even though it is trademarked in pay per click advertising.

The Federal suitwas launched in the Middle District of Tennessee and alleges various violations of Trademark Laws In a press release by the company founder and Chief Executive David Ridings said

“We have discovered that LifeLock has been sponsoring advertisements on most major search engines including (among others) Google, Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, Dogpile, and AOL, that deceptively led consumers to Lifelock.com. Specifically, when you searched ‘Namesafe.com’ in any major search engine, you found an advertisement that said ‘Namesafe.com’ but when you clicked on it, you were not directed to the official site for NAMESAFE (www.namesafe.com), but rather to our competitor, LifeLock.com. It is one of the most bizarre attempts to steal a company brand and its costumers that I have personally seen. Ironically enough, we consider it a form of ‘corporate identity theft’ from a company that is in the business of protecting identities, and we really could not tolerate it. Having said that, we expect it will stop today.”

However, in an article by Stephen Shankland from CNET LifeLock denied the allegations.

“We as a company have never bought any branded search terms belonging to any other company. In fact, we have been the victim of many other companies trying to capitalize on the success of LifeLock by buying the term ‘LifeLock’.”

Identity Theft Labs pointed out in an article on Name Safe that until recently bidding on the trademarked names of competitors was common in the identity theft industry.

Should an identity protection company be allowed to bid on another companies keyword name? That is a question we must answer shortly for the sake of all industries.

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