Perry Ellis owns the penguin! and anatomy of a human DOS attack?

From Google:

"Per a complaint from Perry Ellis International, we are investigating the use of the term 'PENGUIN' as it relates to their brand."

I never would have guessed, though Jen Goode (of www.jgoodedesigns.com) did - she's had her own run-in with them over her insanely adorable (and entirely original!) penguin tshirts.

Google also says:

"As we mentioned earlier, our review process is manual and mistakes do occur."

So now I'm kind of feeling sorry for Google. Does it count as a denial of service attack when the resources being tied up are human? 

Step 1: register a common word as your trademark

Step 2: trawl Google ads for your word and issue automated complaints

Step 3: wait till all of Google's humans are tied up manually investigating your complaints

Step 4: do something nefarious (like suddenly put out a ton of ads using everybody else's trademarks...? [1] ) 

Hmmm...

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[1] Yeah, I'm not very imaginative when it comes to nefarious. 

Posted via web from Jen's posterous