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France: No Google Text Ads For Trademarked Words
ASN writes "Reuters reports that a French court barred Google from providing text ads with search results for trademarked terms, except those from the trademark owner (in this case, 'Bourse des vols,' potentially -- 'Microsoft,' 'Scientology'
even 'Linux').
According to Reuters, 'If it was upheld on appeal and validated in other countries the decision could force the search services to pre-screen search terms for trademarks before letting advertisers use them.' Google was fined 75,000 euros for the practice, and would have to pay 1,500 euro for each further infraction while appeal is underway (which
makes one wonder if Google is paying for this)."
Trademarks? WHAT trademarks? This is ludicrous. If someone types in Ford, how is Google supposed to know if they're searching for Ford Motors, Gerald Ford, or informating on fording rivers? If I type in Windows, do they have to screen all ads not by Microsoft - even those for window cleaners?
Insanity. Trademark laws were a good idea, but they're now even more insane than copyright laws. The courts seem to have forgotten that trademarks have a limited scope based on area of business and geographical area.
Google should dump Google.fr and continue doing what they're doing. That'll leave the French courts with no one to sue nationally and will be another nail in the coffin for French xenophobia.
Trolling is a art,
A trademark is an exclusive right to use a name, phrase or logo with regards to a specific market. It is not entirely impossible for two different companies to have the same trademark--remember the nissan.com debacle? The original owner of the nissan.com site (not the car manufacturer) had a trademark on the name "Nissan" and got there first. Another (more prominent) company with a trademark on "Nissan" sued to get the domain and won. However, the original owner still runs a business with the name "Nissan".
Trademarks are to safeguard the reputation of an entity in their market segment. For example, there's several comments about Nissan in the thread. I can trademark Nissan as the name for my company as long as that company isn't in the same markets that the Nissan Motor Corporation is in. There's a Nissan food company that I don't believe is related to the Nissan motor company. As soon as the noodle company started manufacturing motorcycles or engines under the Nissan name, there'd be trademark trouble.
Copyright, on the other hand, is to protect works and ideas of individuals or companies from theft or dilution from others. If I copyright a poem, for example, you are not free to set the poem to music without some sort of compensation to me, the original copyright holder.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
First a trademark has to be actively defended or you loose it. So the firm holding the trademark "bourse des vols" defended it being used by competitor. Just like any US yahoo firm would have defended their term used by competitor in anadvertising with "ford" in it for example.
Second what is with all this xenophobic spout I see thrown at the french ? First and formore US judge and politics are as able to make BIIIG way mistake as french one (COPA, DMCA, Patriot act and I pass many other there).
Second if you really do not wish to have any relationship with french , then buy ntohing from them, sell them nothing, do not even speak on them, ignroe them completly. Throwing xenophobic insult at them only show how "petty" and "arrogant" you are. Do really US peopel feel so insucre that they have to throw insult each possible moment at european in general and french in particular ? Tolerance serems a vain word in some people mouth [or writing].
So Please hold off the insult and discuss whether the trademark law are bad or not, or whether the judge really outstepped its power. Remmember, he did not judge whether internet was an althogether different medium, he did judge it as it was one of the old break and mortar medium [paper], and in France you DO NOT HAVE the right to use your competitor trade mark. (or at least so I remmember. This is why we do not have comparative publicity olike in US/UK).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
France regulates advertising quite differently from other expression. TV commercials require advance approval. Sexy ads are fine. (Although, since 2001, sexual domination and violence in ads has been restricted.) But there are many other restrictions. If an advertiser claims their product is "better", they have to be able to prove it in court or face criminal penalties. Here's the official FAQ on advertising in France.
Under US law, AdWords are clearly "commercial speech" when they lead to a product, The FTC could regulate them.
Google can live with this; they just need to require AdWords purchasers to certify that they're not infringing a trademark.
How is google supposed to know if a word is trademarked? Does France have some kind of list of all registered trademarks, and what kind of product or company they specifically refer to availible electronically? Or even on paper? Even if such a list were availible, how is google supposed to know whether I was searching for information pertaining to a product with a trademarked name or just a normal combination of words? Perhaps I was slightly off in my terminology, and happened to enter a trademarked phrase as opposed to what I was actually looking for (because I didn't know exactly what it was called)? I fear that the simpliest thing for google to do at this point is to start running banner ads. Otherwise, it is likely that some daft frenchmen are going to put them under, one search at a time.
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Crudely Drawn Games
No, its French.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Did you apply your brain before whining about the insult?
Suppose Company A owns and registers a trademark on their product named MegaSuperItem. If company B runs an advertisement saying "ImprovedNiftyItem -- twice as good as MegaSuperItem," who is traditionally at fault? I believe that Company B should be held liable, not the media that published the advertisement.
There is also, as many other people have commented, the fact that trademarks pertain to a specific market or field. The Internet encompasses all those fields recognized by trademark offices and many more. Owning a trademark does not give you exclusive rights to the word -- except as it relates to marketing or selling products or services.
Why should Google be responsible for doing trademark research and forming a legal opinion on whether every AdWord they run may infringe someone's copyright? That burden goes far beyond what is reasonable for any company to bear.
It might not even be a competitor. For example, Fry's in the US sells Microsoft Windows. They're entirely within their rights to use the term "Microsoft Windows" in their ads to identify what they're selling, even though they don't hold the trademark on "Microsoft Windows". Buying a text ad keyed on that term would, IMHO, fall well within that same allowance.
This seems like a bad idea, at least in some cases, for the trademark holder. There are many cases where you *want* other companies to have access to your trademarks for advertising purposes.
As an example, I recently bought a Kawasaki motorcycle. It's a great bike, but there are some extra things I want, and so I went to google and searched for Kawasaki aftermarket parts. Now, every one of the advertisers was using the Kawasaki name, but without a healthy aftermarket presence, Kawasaki would sell a heck of a lot less of their product -- people are a whole lot more willing to buy a motorcycle if they know they can get performance parts for the bike without doing a whole lot of digging.
Even more simply, what if someone is using their name to say that their company is retailing the products of the trademark holder? Then they'd be cutting into their own visibility in the market place, and lowering their own sales.
It seems to me that this is not the most intellegent move on the part of the trademark holder. If you protect your trademark so passionately that you hurt your own product sales, what the hell was the trademark for in the first place?
Narrative
and so have to ABIDE french law of not using your competitor trademark.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Interpertations of market categories can be very broad. For example, some companies (like Pepsi, or Coca-Cola) are considered so large and well known that ANY use of the phrase can be considered infringing.
In other news Slashdot fined $2000 per link click on a news article about Google that caused Google to be fined 1500 euroes with each search.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
...as I recently discoverd that when one googles for the free software project I am maintaining, one gets a sponsored link for an equivalent commercial program. Now, I don't earn anything anyway with my project, so I don't care so much, but still it feels a little odd.
This might be down-modded by Google-fanboys, but it needs to be said: Google has had something like this coming.
As a customer both of Google AdSense and Google AdWords, I have been victim of many of Google's own anti-competitive and censorship policies.
First, if your webpage contains keywords like "war" or "suicide" (as any news page will sometimes) Google will not serve your site paying ads but will serve you Public Service Announcements (PSAs) about saving Gorillas and stuff like that. By Google's own criterion, they wouldn't sponsor news.google.com or the NY Times, except, well, they do. If your money is big enough then it's kay; only smaller sights are oppressed. They have revoked supporting non-PSAs at the recently slashdotted News for Christians site Good Fig:
http://www.goodfig.org
They stopped mainly because Good Fig covers things like the Isreali-Palestinian situation (war), the COPA (the keyword "pornography"), a sex-abuse victim reconciliation study (the keyword "sex"), etc. There also is a story reported here that Google wouldn't allow Valley Firearms LLC or any other firearms retailer to advertise their firearms, while Google will advertise porn links that are only 2 clicks away from ultra-explicit material.
Google wouldn't support paying ads for Slashdot unless Slashdot had big enough money (which they might), because Slashdot covers stories involving the keywords "sex", "pornography", etc., etc.
Next, using Google AdWords I had a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.6% with an average position of 4-5 while Google requires 0.5% for the top spot so I was doing fine---until Google ran my ad on "content focused" sites and got me a "content focused" CTR of 0.1% and are now trying to charge me a $5 "full-restore" fee for my "underperforming keywords/ads." One of the "content-focused" sites was Amazon.com and they ran my ad on a few book pages where you have to scroll way down and read the "You might also be interested in.." section. Like anyone will ever read that.
So, Google's search page rules and they have some of the best and brightest technical minds working for them; however, when it comes to the money-people Google has hired to direct policy and manage how AdWords and AdSense work, they have some clear issues....
Google has a monopoly over good search engines (i.e. google is the only search that anyone wants to use). They should block France until the French Government changes their opinion on this ruling. They'll do this because everyone will complain that they can't use google, and google will tell them that google's no longer profitable in France, and that they can't afford to do business there with the new laws. That should result in some change fairly quickly :)
My other car is first.
If a company has a problem with another company using their trademark for advertising, they should confront the company who bought the ad, not the media who carried it. Requiring Google to proactively compare every word against trademarks is ridiculous, and is a bad precedent that could be extended to cripple other forms of media.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
My local grocery store (Kroger) includes an advertising discount coupon for a competitor when certain items are purchased. I am sure that in the USA, if it were to become illegal on the internet, a number of companies would have to stop the coupons for competitors. I wonder if this is also common practice in France and grocery stores or other businesses.
I would respond to this censorship with further censorship.. by BANNING ALL FRENCH IP ADDRESSES!
-- I am. Therefore, I think!