An e-mail from the vice president of marketing arrives one morning with a link to a Web site that includes a client's trademarked business name, plus the ubiquitous .com.
Confronting and Understanding 'Gripe Sites'
The Internet has provided an unprecedented opportunity for individuals to disseminate information widely at a very low cost. This means that virtually anybody who wants to distribute a message can do so. <br>It is this sense of empowerment that may drive individuals to spend the time and energy to create sites devoted to complaints about a particular product, service, company, organization, or individual. Frequently these sites employ trademarks owned by their targets, sometimes in the site's domain name itself, and always in the text of the site. Internet search engines pick these references up, so that the gripe sites often turn up side-by-side with official corporate sites in response to Internet searches.
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