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The new policy will allow businesses to place trademarked terms directly in the copy of text advertisements that run in the U.S. starting next month, the company announced in a blog post on Thursday. The move, which Google said will improve the quality of its advertisements, comes as advertisers have begun bidding less money for the individual search terms that their ads appear alongside and as Google's revenue growth slows in the dismal economic climate. Until now, Google has forbidden companies from placing trademarked terms in their advertising copy unless they owned the trademark or had explicit permission from the trademark owners. Brand owners have historically had serious concerns about Google's policy with regards to trademarks, said Eric Goldman, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law.

As the impact of digital advertising on consumer privacy comes under scrutiny, AT&T is taking a stance in support of stricter standards. In its testimony Thursday at a House subcommittee hearing on the issue, the telecommunications heavyweight is expected to advocate more transparency and consumer control in the fast-growing field of targeted ads.

OnMobile Global Limited is India's largest value-added service (VAS) company.[2][3][4] The company offers contest management, content aggregation and distribution, voice short codes, mCommerce solutions, missed call alerts, multimedia push services, mobile advertising, mobile search, ringtones, ringback tones, personalized music greetings, mobile media portals, phone backup, voiceportals, and voice SMS.

China's largest Internet search engine, Baidu, was said to be "responsible for the vast majority of illegal downloading of music in China, deriving significant advertising revenue." But last month China issued an IPR protection plan involving 28 ministries and organizations that had 170 concrete measures to fight copyright infringement. Also, the Supreme People's Court raised compensation for victims from 500,000 yuan ($73,000) to more than 1 million yuan ($146,000). Last year, China closed 192 websites that profited from copyright infringement and uncovered 5719 cases of copyright infringement, Commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office Tian Lipu said.

The Act contains some contentious provisions - such as Clause 79, which has been widely criticised as being "draconian". Some provisions recommended by the Parliamentary Committee had been rejected by the Union government - particularly Clause 73 relatin g to cyber cafes maintaining a registry of persons and Web sites logged into. The Bill has been passed in some undue haste, for reasons not very clear. In this regard, the points raised by the Opposition are valid because the Act lacks clarity in many re spects, and seems to have been drafted without adequate legal and, more important, technical inputs. It must be emphasised that the optimistic projections by organisations such as NASSCOM (the National Association for Software and Service Companies), that the Act would boost the volume of e-commerce in India from the current Rs.450 crores to over Rs.2,5 00 crores and to Rs.10,000 crores by 2002, are quite misplaced. First, in the Indian context, much of the e-commerce involves neither business-to-client (B2C) transactions nor business-to-business (B2B) transactions but largely revenue from advertising o n the Web. Therefore, it becomes difficult to term precisely what e-commerce is and to quantify its value. Secondly, the Act itself is not going to alter greatly the situation because, for one, as legal experts point out, even in the absence of the Act t he judiciary would not have dismissed an evidence just because it is in the nature of an e-mail or an electronic document. It would have been treated as circumstantial evidence to the case at hand, and the provisions in the Indian Penal Code and the Crim inal Procedure Code have sufficient interpretative room to provide for prosecution if such evidence is conclusive.

"There have been several Shanzhai mobile cases exposed recently, including India's expulsion of China Shanzhai mobiles. China's Shanzhai culture has got a pretty bad reputation the world over, to the point where other Shanzhai manufactures complain: "copycatting shouldn't be so unscrupulous; law breaking can't be that obviously extreme. HAFF-COMM forces all of us into the international spotlight.""