I have a legal question regarding outright misuse of a brand name.

One of our competitors is using our brand name as a keyword in META tags and site content. Not as a review or comparison (which would be OK), but as separate keywords, totally irrelevant to the rest of the content. Without any kind of permission, of course.

It's not even a Google ranking issue as much as a "brand dilution" issue - these guys are VERY low-end in our particular industry, while we're very HIGH-END. To add insult to injury, we're the exclusive distributor of the brand, i.e. there is absolutely NO way these guys can ever become a dealer/distributor of our products.

I don't want our brand name to appear on their site, unless it was within reasonable content (review/comparison/forum/etc).

However, the brand name is not registered yet - the process has been started, but the USPTO estimates 8-9 more months.

Google Team's response to the complaint was to present proof of ownership of the trademark. Which we don't have yet.

Is there anything else I can do?

(Besides making a showcase of this cheese-ball tactic on related blogs?)