Abstract:
The purpose of this research is a comparative study on legislative provisions on search engine marketing on internet. The study concentrates in two areas; 1) Problem of using of trademark, trade name, and domain name as a keyword in meta tag in websites and 2) Problem of selling trademark as keyword trigger ad. The research is based mostly on Thai and foreign existing legislations and all sources of academic papers and articles as well as various court precedents by comparing mainly to United States of America.
The research shows current Thai legislations, which are Trademark Act B.E. 2534 in regard to trademark protection and Civil and Commercial Code in regard to trade name protection, are able to provide coverage for rights of keyword owner in regard to keyword being used by others for search engine marketing. By adapting section 420, section 421 and section 5 of Civil and Commercial Code, as well as Consumer Protection Act B.E. 2522 in regard to advertising controls. Nevertheless, these legislations seem to have restrictions that result in limitation of full protection and lack clear definition of direct wrong doing. The courts must use judicial discretion for decisions which keyword owner may not be fully protected.
This study has proposed clearer definition of legislations to extend protection coverage and allows the use of keywords in search engine marketing under justified purposes and within scopes of legal fair use.