John Gartner has a good piece in Revenue magazine about trademark poaching, correctly identifying it as an up and coming challenge for affiliate marketers.

The WSJ published an article today about trademark 'piggybacking' in Google's search advertising, and the growing resentment of the practice by Google's advertisers. They use the term 'piggybacking' to refer to the use of:

Stephen Heise (via SearchEngineLand) identifies some advertisers that are cloaking their AdWords URLs:

Referrer Laundering is a technique frequently used by ill-intentioned websites to redirect traffic on to a second party, while masking the actual origin of the traffic. We see it frequently in affiliate search engine advertising - the user experience typically looks like this:

It looks like the addition of geolabels wasn't the only change made to Yahoo's search results. They've now moved the Paypal checkout cart from alongside the title to below the ad. It looks like these changes have been in place for at least a week, although they may have been live longer.

With a tip of the hat to Google, Yahoo has added the geography of geo-targeted search ads below the ad text.

Techcrunch reports that CitizenHawk recently raised a $3M round.

Search Engine Roundtable reports that some Adwords advertisers have begun to see Google enforcing their new display url policy. The report is based on a WebmasterWorld thread in which two advertisers report enforcement.

Thomas O'Toole reviews a recent decision by the District Court in the Punch Clock v Smart Software Development case. The two websites in question (punchclock.com & punch-clock.com).

In June of 2007, a group of plaintiffs filed a class-action cybersquatting lawsuit against domain parking companies and Google (for providing the ads to the domain parking companies). As Eric Goldman states in his initial 07 analysis "I believe this is the first lawsuit against Google for its domainer relationships."