Bihari v. Gross

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that defendant’s use of trademarks in metatags constituted a “use in commerce” under the Lanham Act in part because the hyperlinks “effectively act[ed] as a conduit, steering potential customers away from Bihari Interiors and toward its competitors”
• noting that a harm in the Internet context is that “the potential customer believes that the competing website is associated with the website the customer was originally searching for and will not resume searching for the original website”
• no initial interest confusion where gripe site using plaintiffs meta-data was not in competition with that of plaintiff
• use of plaintiffs marks in metatags by websites critical of plaintiff permissible means of describing contents of sites
• no likelihood of confusion because no reasonable viewer would believe that the disparaging comments regarding designer’s business ethics on defendant’s websites were endorsed by designer
• no initial interest confu sion because internet user visiting site containing disparaging comments about mark owner would believe that sites belong to him or his business

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).