Utah Lawmakers Shrink from Search Law

It looks like Utah has its trademark tail between its legs. By way of Eric Goldman, the Bureau of National Affairs reports that the state won’t implement the Trademark Protection Act for at least a couple months. It seems as though tech firms like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and eBay (reps of which trekked over to Salt Lake City late last month to discuss their displeasure with the law) threatened to sue, causing the legislators to shrink away from their original law.

That law would have established a registry for special electronic trademarked terms and prevented non-trademark owners advertisers from targeting search ads to terms in that database to residents of Utah. (See ClickZ’s in-depth coverage of the law’s origins and potential implications for Utah industry.)

According to my sources, those firms were supposed to have met again with Utah lawmakers sometime around last week. From the beginning, firms including Google were not happy (to say the least) with the law and had no intention of making accommodations for it (like, say, making it easy for advertisers to exclude Utah from search ad campaign targeting).

Think this law will fade into oblivion or be implemented as a shell of its former self? Time will tell.