The State Senate in Utah killed a bill which was attempting to regulate the way in which web advertisers used trademarks. This particular bill would have made it illegal for a company to use the trademark of another company as a trigger for one of its own web advertisements.

This was not the first time that the State Senate had attempted to pass similar bills. There are at least four previous attempts which produced a variety of outcomes. In some cases, the laws were declared unconstitutional while in other cases the writing of the bills was simply too poor.

Utah is the home of a couple large websites including Overstock.com. This site has already filed a lawsuit over this type of trademark infringement. Their claim was that a competitor was improperly using the Overstock trademark to bring attention to its own web advertisements.

A number of internet based companies campaigned against the bill. They suggested that if it became law, businesses that were focused on web advertising would be the ones that were hurt. They also claimed that ordinary web browsers would also be unfairly punished because they would miss out on an opportunity to see web advertisements that might of interest to them.

The director of the High Tech Law Institute, Eric Goldman, said that the bill was a disaster. He also noted that it was very probable that the State Senate in Utah would introduce another bill with a similar focus in the future.