Trademarked Terms

I am admittedly a Newbie here so this question might be stupid but I was curious about bidding on trademarked terms. Many google searches for specific items I deal with do not show any (or very little) adwords advertisers. The only ones that show up are for bizrate or nextag and the like including of course ebay usually.
Is bidding on trademarked terms strictly prohibited?
Here is an example. The term mickey mouse gets according to Yahoo over 100K searches a month, yet there are only 3 Adwords advertisers, Target, Shopzilla and another?
Adwords estimates that for 10 cents one could get in the top 1 -3 positions. So if someone is selling Mickey mouse stuff why wouldn’t they bid on the terms.
I know in the Disney affiliate agreement they say you can’t bid on their trademarked terms, but if I don’t care about being a Disney […]

Original post by GaryD