Jenzabar, a company that was founded by a student leader at Tiananmen Square and that makes software for institutions of higher education, brought defamation and trademark action against documentary filmmakers whose portrayal of the leader was unfavorable. After the defamation claims were dismissed, the company pursued trademark claims based on the theory that the use of the company’s name in the meta tags of pages of a film-related web site that discussed the company infringed and diluted the company’s mark. Public Citizen argues that the meta tags are noncommercial speech that truthfully describes a subject of the web page and hence is protected by the First Amendment, and in any event that there is no confusion about the source of the web pages, that the trademarks are not diluted, and that the use of the trademarks is fair use. |