Brand Institute - BRANDPOLL: The Tampa Tribune

BRANDPOLL: page not found
By ERIC HILLER of The Tampa Tribune

Top image consultancy firm Brand Institute Inc. is scrambling red-faced to the defense of it's own brand integrity.

The giant is poised for a legal battle with art group IRATIONAL over acts of alleged copyright violation - on search engines.

Brand Institute Inc. is in the business of protecting the brand name identities of a wealth of corporations, in the new wild west of the Internet. Its market research service BRANDPOLL(tm) provides brand ranking and evaluation for a client list including McDonalds, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, the Cartoon Network, the University of Chicago and Xerox.

But fire up a search engine to find "BRANDPOLL" itself and you might be surprised - to be directed straight to the site of maverick web artists IRATIONAL.ORG - with BRANDPOLL.COM(tm)'s own site listed second.

BI is more enraged than surprised and is threatening legal action. Since September 2000, IRATIONAL.ORG has received a series of communications from BI's corporate counsel. They cite "substantial damage" to the branding behometh's reputation, arising from confusion when members of the public might inadvertantly follow a search engine listing to IRATIONAL's site.

The irony is there's virtually nothing there. IRATIONAL has long since removed the offending pages and is simply redirecting visitors back to Brand Institute Inc. But despite this, the contested top-level listing remains cached in the memory of several major search engines including Google and Lycos.

It's a major public affront to a company that bases its integrity on safeguarding the unique online identities of its clients.

To permanently remove a website from a seach engine requires authorization from the site's validated webmaster. Technically powerless to act in this situation, BI are taking the unprecedented step of applying International Copyright law to the untested territory of search engine results.