Bulletin Board

A collection of short articles about technology. Topics include fighting legal battles over meta-tags; using the Internet to cut travel costs; avoiding Y2K scams; and alleviating back pain.

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Bulletin Board

What's in a Cybername?
As a pioneer in the burgeoning field of interim executive staffing, Marion McGovern realized early on that a Web presence could help her reach companies in need of temporary senior managers. So back in 1996, the president of M ² LLC, a San Francisco-based broker of independent consulting services, launched M ²Net, a Web site advertising M ²'s ability to provide seasoned "interim executives" for limited-term assignments.

Little did McGovern know then that her education in the ways of the Web was just beginning. In August 1998 she received a letter from a lawyer representing Interim Services Inc., an international temporary-staffing company with annual revenues of more than $1.8 billion, requesting that M ² "cease and desist" using the word interim on the pages of M ²Net. The letter stated that Interim Services owned a service-mark registration for the term and threatened litigation if M ² failed to remove phrases such as INTERIM EXECUTIVE and INTERIM STAFFING from the site. "The response from our attorney was 'You've got to be kidding," says McGovern. "But then I received an E-mail from a woman at a company doing interim housing, saying she had received a similar notice."

Of particular concern to Interim Services, according to the letter, was that the M ²Net home page included the word interim in meta-tags, lines of code embedded in Web sites that search engines like AltaVista and Infoseek scour the Web for and store in their databases. Then, when a user types in a keyword (say, interim), the search engine displays links to the sites whose meta-tags match that word, thereby offering the potential for increased traffic.

McGovern believes her company has every right to use--both in the visible text of her site and in meta-tags--a word that's gained broad industry acceptance. "This aspect of the business has been coined by the staffing industry as the 'interim executive' niche," she says. "Given this industry parlance, we used the term interim as a meta-tag."

Interim Services has a different perspective, since Web users typing the word interim into AltaVista or Infoseek would see M ²'s site listed in the results. "The standard for trademark infringement is whether there's a likelihood of confusion," says John B. Smith, Interim Services' general counsel. "If someone uses interim as a meta- tag, we think that's an egregious case of causing confusion." Smith confirmed that Interim Services has sent cease-and-desist letters to M ² and others, and that the company has resorted to litigation in one case.

Faced with the prospect of a legal battle against a well-heeled adversary, McGovern eventually backed down and complied with Interim Services' requests, converting capitalized instances of the word interim to lowercase and removing the term from M ²Net's list of meta-tags. She says the result will be fewer visitors to M ²'s site. But the more important outcome is a lesson about the workings of the networked economy. "The Internet has a Horatio Alger-like mystique: that anyone with a great cyber-idea can challenge the big boys and succeed. But the fact is, the big boys have just as much clout in cyberspace," says McGovern. "I couldn't have paid for all those lawyers to defend infringement for a service mark. So scale can still matter." --Andrew Raskin

Setting Your Sites
Small and midsize companies set up Web sites for a variety of reasons. These topped the list:

To reach new customers: 78%

To sell goods and services: 65%

To disseminate information more efficiently: 62%

To keep up with the competition: 23%

To expand globally: 17%

To reach prospective employees: 13%

Source: 1998 Survey of Small and Mid-Sized Businesses, conducted by Arthur Andersen's Enterprise Group and National Small Business United.

Road Assistance
If there's one thing I've learned from our subscribers, it's that everything on a hotel bill is negotiable," says Robert W. Lawson, director of Web marketing for the Hotel Guide (www.hotelguide.com), an Internet travel service based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Lawson is referring to the subscribers to Hotel Talk, the weekly E-mail discussion digest that he moderates. Every week, Lawson (who lives in Putney, Vt., and telecommutes) receives 40 to 50 letters from the traveling faithful, full of questions and advice. He then repackages the incoming mail and fires it off to his 3,000 subscribers.