Google’s billions have come from selling keyword searches. So I can pay $X to come up in their list of advertisers whenever someone searches for “blogging”, “cats”, “Sydney” etc, no one really has a problem with that. However, what Google also does is use trademarks as keywords. So if you were Sony you can pay to have your ad come up everytime someone searches for “Panasonic”. This has annoyed some people in recent years and resulted Google being sued for a variety of various trademark/consumer law infringements.

I’ve always thought it incredible that anyone could possibly find the use of keywords in a search engine “trademark use” or in any reasonable way, deceptive, but the world’s a funny place. Google has already lost a couple of cases in France: One against Louis Vuitton for “trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising” and one against a chain of hotels. Trademark counterfeiting! How incredible is that? Anyway, at least a judge in the US has seen fit to dismiss a trademark/keyword case against Google last month.

No Tags