It is nice to see that participation at the forums, on behalf of the search engines as well as the individuals that use the search engines make a difference. A thread at WebmasterWorld named Apple wants to take the MAC out of MAC Address... tells a story of a member who had his ads "pulled because they included the term Mac." This individual advertiser is in the business of "client authentication based on several things including the MAC Address of the machine." So the term "MAC Address" is pretty well used in that area, it stands for "Media Access Control address." It often confuses people, the term that is, when someone asks a newbie what their "MAC Address" is, they said, "I don't have a Mac."
A couple weeks later the issue was resolved with AdWords by allowing him to use the term "as long as we make sure to use "MAC Address" and not "MAC"."
It is very interesting to watch these specific cases, it is still early on on what is legal and not legal to bid on. In fact, we have a whole section on Legal Issues in Search most of it in terms of PPC engines. And we have covered 3+ sessions at SES on legal topics, including; Leggo My Trademark: A Search Engine Legal Update - SES NYC 04, Moot Court: Trademark Protection on Trial - SES San Jose 04 and Brand Summit: Life After Geico - Google - SES NYC 05.
