Although a district judge in New York dismissed claims by publishers that the promotion of sites selling pirate copies of textbooks through Google AdSense constituted a breach of copyright, the lawsuit is not over. The judge said that claims that the ads infringed the publishers’ trademarks could proceed to trial. Key to those claims is that the ads featured images of textbook covers including the publishers’ names, such as McGraw Hill and Elsevier.

Media mix models (MMM), originally developed in the 1960’s, have undergone a resurgence as new technologies make them easier to execute and click-based attribution becomes less credible. But evaluating MMM brings its own challenges. Australia-based Mutinex offers a vendor-neutral Open Source MMM Validation Framework which is now available for free to North American marketers and agencies.