In the past week, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo about someone attempting to file a U.S. trademark application for registration of the term “SEO.”  The applicant in question here has identified a long litany of advertising related services in connection with which the SEO mark has been used.

As surely as the phases of the moon change, I see some post in the blogosphere about a joker who is trying to “trademark”* a common industry term.  Fear not, good friends, there is little to worry about in such cases.  I’ll attempt to explain why.

First of all, simply applying for a trademark means very little unless the application actually proceed to registration.  And, in 99% of the cases where the joker applicant in questions is attempting to usurp some common industry term, there will never be a registration granted.

For the most part, trademarks in the United States (and, indeed, in most other countries) apply only to those goods and services with which they are used.  There is an exception to this rule for trademarks like FORD and GOOGLE that have achieve what in trademark law to called “fame,” and owners of those marks may prevent others from using them on goods and services unrelated to their own offerings.  But this famousness exception clearly has nothing to do with some fool trying to get a trademark registration for a common industry term.

When a trademark applicant applies for registration of a trademark, they must specify what goods and services are (or will be) used in connection with the mark.  If the trademark (or part of it) has some significance in relation to the industry in which the goods or services are offered, or the goods or services themselves, the applicant is typically asked to state that significance.  When the trademark (or part of it) has some meaning in relation to the goods or services and the meaning is descriptive in nature, then the trademark cannot be protected under U.S. law.

Seeing how this works in action, someone may very well wish to use the term SEO as a brand name for baked goods.  In that case, the term SEO has no relation whatsoever to the goods offered, so the trademark would not be rejected for descriptiveness.  Someone applying for registration of the mark SEO in connection with services that are clearly related to advertising generally and search engine optimization in particular, has got some problems on their hands.  It doesn’t matter one bit of the applicant claims (whether true or not) that the term SEO as they use it stands for something else — that is completely irrelevant.  The only question is whether consumers in the relevant industry would recognize the term in question and, if so, then does the term as recognized describe some aspect of the relevant goods or services identified in the application?

In the case of an application to register the mark SEO for services clearly having everything to do with search engine optimization, there is little to no hope that a registration will be granted.  Further, playing games with the US Patent and Trademark Office by arguing that you mean something else when you use the acronym SEO, even though it is obvious that your services are directly related to search engine optimization, is not going to win you any favors.

Lastly, I’ll also add that any discussion over who the first person was to coin the acronym SEO is moot.  Trademarks are not like copyrights or patents — being first to “coin” a phrase means nothing.  You have to use a trademark in connection with goods or services, in a non-descriptive way, in order to obtain rights in the trademark.  When some term becomes a widely known concept in a particular industry, the cat is essentially out of the bag — nobody will ever really be able to hold trademark rights in that term, within the relevant industry, because nobody within that industry would ever see the phrase and think it was a trademark rather than the term having a recognized meaning.  There’s still that possibility of SEO brand apple pies, however.

*For those of you who still use “trademark” as a verb, I’ll do my part on behalf of all trademark attorneys and tell you to stop doing so.  One does not “trademark” something.  One uses a trademark and thereby accrues trademark rights.  Often times, when people say that someone is trying to “trademark” something, they tend to mean that someone is trying to prevent everyone else from using that term in any way whatsoever — this is actually not possible under the law.  One can try to register a trademark, but that is a very different thing.

St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony Larussa filed in May a lawsuit against Twitter, claiming that the company’s allowance of the username “TonyLaRussa” was a violation of his rights.  In particular, LaRussa claimed that the account and its use constituted a violation of his trademark rights, misappropriation of his name and likeness, and an invasion of his privacy.  Legal observers opined that these types of claims were an odd fit for the circumstances and, more importantly, a federal law known as the Communications Decency Act contains a provision that shields publishers of user data against liability for such publication.  While the law does not protect a party from liability for intellectual property claims, the assertion of trademark claims in LaRussa’s complaint were arguably misplaced.

This week, news of LaRussa’s withdrawal of his lawsuit has been made public.  This, before any real activity in the case was undertaken.  LaRussa’s camp claims that his objective of having the offending account removed was accomplished and, accordingly, the lawsuit was no longer necessary.  Critics say that the lawsuit was never meritorious and was withdrawn before having to spend time and money substantiating the claims.

For observers who have their own online businesses that allow user comments or other content, this lawsuit is a good reminder of a few things.  One is that there is, on the books at least, a fairly good set of protections for publishers of user data that may run afoul of the law.  As mentioned above, the CDA (Section 230) provides such protection for non-IP claims.  For copyright related claims, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act provides its own safe harbor provisions that also employ a “notice and take down” procedure that requires publishers to respond to complaints received from content owners.  However, despite these protections, third parties certainly may threaten and even file lawsuits against online publishers of user content.

For publishers of user content, the potential risks are many.  The best advice is to foster a community that is unwelcoming of illegal activity of any kind.  Beyond this, a site’s terms and conditions should certainly allow for summary termination of accounts for any illicit or even “ojbectionable” activities, as defined by the site owner.  If and when a threat does come, experienced legal counsel should be relied on for determining whether a claim is baseless or solid, and quick actions should be taken, if necessary.

Just over a month ago, and all in the span of a single week, Facebook.com announced a set of drastic changes to its Terms and Conditions, a massive revolt ensued, and just as quickly as it all started, Facebook retreated. As the dust settled, many great legal analyses of the events quickly made their way to the web, including one by a favorite Internet lawyer of mine, Eric Goldman. For the most part, everything that there is to be said about this episode from a legal perspective has been said: Facebook’s changes were unnecessary and over-reaching, their initial response was a joke, and everyone who told them so was proven right by Facebook’s ultimate backing off. But as Facebook begins re-drafting their terms, this time with the input of their community, it is a great time to consider what business lessons may be gleaned from Facebook’s recent experience.

Terms and conditions for websites have an interesting but short history. Such things were not commonly needed until use of the web became popular among average consumers in roughly the first half of the 1990s. Further, things did not get particularly tricky for drafters of such terms and conditions until the appearance of highly dynamic web services. Users began contributing data as a major feature of sites, and, ultimately, just about every kind of commerce or social activity transpiring in the real world could be found online. As things stand now, the terms and conditions of a website might ultimately be the single most important legal document that a company has drafted — certainly could be strongly argued for user generated content sites such as Flickr or YouTube, and by extension Facebook, which offers many similar functions as those sites.

As terms and conditions have become more complicated and increasingly vital to the value structure of companies, another phenomenon has been simultaneously brewing: consumers are more informed and smarter about legal issues that effect them. From the by-the-second blogging of the now infamous SCO/Linux lawsuits at Groklaw.com to the rise of the site that “broke” the Facebook Terms of Use story, Consumerist.com, it is very clear that consumer-facing legal documents face much higher scrutiny now than ever before.

From one perspective, the unnamed lawyer that drafted Facebook’s now defunct amendments was doing precisely the right thing — changing an agreement to give even greater rights to her client (i.e. Facebook). But the reality is that even if Facebook was within its legal rights to make the changes that it did (this point is up for debate, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument), it was clearly not the right business move. So what was? And what is the right move for web services that may be drafting their first ever terms of use and expecting to utilize user generated content?

The answer for Facebook, or for any other web company, is not to simply weaken their terms of use to the point that no user would ever object. Rather, the answer is to craft terms of use that strike a reasonable balance between the broad rights a company would like to have if they were operating in a vacuum and the much more specific set of rights needed to actually operate a site on the day the terms of use are drafted. The idea, of course, is that the middle ground will safely protect the author company’s rights in view of projected expansion in scope, functionality, or business model. The key in drafting such a document is making sure that the terms writer has a very clear understanding of the business of the company , including the specific operation of the technology employed to conduct that business. An increasingly useful mantra that I try to instill in my clients is that the more their business model depends on content or activity of users to create value, then the more likely it is that those customers will read and try to understand your terms of use; accordingly, the more important it is that you draft terms with the expectation that it will receive and withstand such scrutiny.

A corollary to the foregoing is that changes made to terms of use mid-stream should be made with particular care. In the recent Facebook situation, what is most curious is that the land grab for rights would occur apparently without such concern. The attempts by Facebook to justify their changes by general platitudes along the lines of “we need these rights to operate” makes one wonder why they thought their old terms of use was so deficient. Alas, the protestations of Mark Zuckerberg that we simply ought to trust him did not pass the smell test, nor would similarly vague justifications be useful in justifying a company’s overbearing grant of rights to itself.

The lessons here are:

Take your website terms and conditions seriously, and recognize that they should be tailored to the specific operation and needs of your business. Slapping in the most egregious version you (or your lawyer) can find from some behemoth company’s website is probably going to cause headaches.

If you wish to change your terms and conditions in a material and adverse way (as respects your users), consider the messaging that will accompany such changes and be prepared to justify them — both you and your counsel should believe in the necessity of such changes. Assume that users will actually read your terms of use (and that they will do so with the assumption that you are trying to screw them).

Although not discussed in this article, privacy policies for websites taking in user data are also extremely important to get right. Many states, including Massachusetts, have rapidly evolving laws concerning the protection of personalized data, so keeping on top is not easy. Just like rights grants or other important provisions in a terms of use, privacy policies must be carefully drafted to ensure that everything you want or need to do is permitted, while avoiding the “land grab” approach of taking everything you can from your users.