This leaves the door ajar for those who wish fairly to compare their services with that of a rival and then include that rival’s name in their tags.This decision on usage was based partly upon a case initiated by Playboy against one of its former models, who had used the terms “Playboy” and “Playmate” in the meta tags for her website. Here it was ruled that she was not in breach of trademark law as she was a former Playboy model and Playmate, so these were descriptive terms which related to her career and were not intended to draw business away from Playboy itself.Graham Smith, author of Internet Law and Regulation, feels that the legal situation in the US will be closely shadowed by the UK. “There have been no English cases so far on meta tags,” he says, “but there is no reason why the trademark law shouldn’t apply to use of meta tags in the same way as it does to other uses. The only thing that people might think was a question mark is the fact that the tags are hidden, but under the current trademark law the definition of use and infringement is fairly wide.”.

IT’S OFFICIAL: the end of city living is upon us. According to the latest United Nations forecast, London is shrinking, Paris has stopped growing and New York and Tokyo are slowing down. It seems the cool thing to do is to dump the city dirt, get ISDN, and head for the hills, computer and printer in tow. Yet this is not an “I’m-tired-of-life” scenario or a repeat of the hippy exodus of the 1960s.

It’s a radically different migration of young professionals who are finally able to free themselves from the constraints of the office and able to take the job with them to a cottage in the countryside. The key to modern living seems to be: to keep the city income but live close to nature, in a barn, far away from the misery of privatised trains and the Northern Line.
With the high cost of office space hitting the pockets of large companies, a growing number of UK bosses are coming around to the notion of their key people working most of, or even the whole week, from home. I’ve seen some intriguing new titles popping up on the managerial course lists, such as “How to manage Virtual Teams” or “Motivating the Internet Telecommuter”. Better late than never, I say, as the technology has been here for a while now, but the old work habits of many companies die hard.Studies of remote working indicate that teleworkers are more productive than their office-based counterparts. This is not surprising, considering how uncomfortable most offices are these days. At home you can “personalise” your workspace in the same way you manage My Yahoo!. The office is a big, faceless, bland portal, where your plants are standard issue, your furniture picked out by office managers to fit their safety standards and your computer is at least three upgrades behind the curve, as your IT department is deep in the Y2K freeze.At home, you set up your own IT standards, your plants can be the most offensive man-eating weeds and, instead of queuing in the canteen, your favourite sushi is in the fridge, delivered daily by the web-based Japanese grocer.