"Jon Beets" (great nym!) writes:

what really gets me is the part quoted below.. They are saying since "Scientology", "Dianetics", "Hubbard" and "NOTs" are registered trademarks they cannot be used in metatags in a webpage... The restriction in use of words in a web page is just flat out censorship.. Absolutely ridiculous... It would be one thing if someone used the words to represent a business.. But I would think metatags at the very least would fall under the "Fair Use" clause.

Take a look at http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ca/xml/01/04/23/010423calist.xml for an analysis of some of the cases involving metatags and trademarks. That article discusses Eli Lilly's lawsuit against a health food company that put Prozac in the metatags for their herbal antidepressant. In that case there was a possibility of confusion; a customer might have though that the product was somehow related to Prozac or officially sanctioned by Prozac's manufacturer. However: "Comparison advertising, whether in print or on a Web site, is one of the few permitted uses of another company's trademark," Bevilacqua says. If a company runs a legitimate comparison advertisement on its Web site, mention of a competitor's trademark in the metatags of the page with the comparison ad would be an acceptable use of the mark, Bevilacqua says. Your case would be a lot more similar to this. You are basically doing a comparison between scientology and, well, sanity. As long as it is clear that your site is ANTI scientology and is not endorsed in any way by the church, then there should be no possibility of confusion.