TIPS^®  Taiwan Intellectual Property Special

Framelink May be Deemed in Violation of the Fair Trade Law

In May 1999, the “National Teacher Association” (NTA) caused the website of the “Information and Education Center of the Ministry of Education” (IECME) to be showed in NTA’s website by “framing/framelink.” The NTA’s framelink called the attention on the issue whether or not framing constitutes the violation of the Fair Trade Law (FTL).

So-called “framing/framelink” is to insert one’s website into another website simply by a frame. When user clicks the name of that website, the computer screen will still show the original website and another website will be showed by a smaller frame on the computer screen.

As to the above, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) recently indicated that whether framing will violate the FTL should be judged case by case. The FTC also declares several standards for determining the legitimacy of framing:

Whether the website and the framed website are competitors in the relevant market;

Whether the framing causes the confusion that the consumer mistakenly believes that there is a business connection/relationship between the website and the framed website;

Whether the website free rides the framed website’s good will; and

Whether the website conducts other deceptive or obviously unfair acts that are sufficient to affect trading order.