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GEICO vs Google Ads: Google Wins
abertoll writes "A federal judge decided that Google is able to sell ads under the GEICO trademark, claiming that this is fair use of the trademark. GEICO's contention was that competing insurance companies were using the name GEICO under which to buy Google Ads, so that when someone searches for GEICO, their ad would come up."
Geico sues the Yellow Pages for letting competitors advertise right in the "Auto Insurance" section!
Seriously. I'd like to say this is the stupidest lawsuit ever, but there's been a rampant stupidity in the courts.. well, for as long as I can remember.
So, with that definition in mind, I think a domain name does give an indication of the source of goods, and www.googlesucksadonkey.com would not be valid for a search engine name...
and now back to the fallout shelter...
For example: this story
So as happy as we are about this ruling in the States, it looks like France isn't so keen on letting companies bid on their competitors' trademarks.
I don't know how this influences broad-match type scenarios, though. What happens if somebody searches for "(trademark term) cars", and a competitor buys "cars" rather than the trademarked term? This seems like it would be prohibitively difficult to stop.
The UK is the same - adverts always use "Another leading brand" or similar - or an older version of the same company's product - to compare to.
Geico sends C&D's and sues people all the time over weird shit like this. Upper management seems to be pretty clueless about the internet. If you have a domain name with Geico in it, you will be contacted eventually and threatened.
It's funny though because they took the domain http://geicosucks.com from someone and decided to point that domain name to the same ip address as geico.com. So you can get a quote and everything from geicosucks.com. They could have done a simple redirect but their internet "expert" claims that they would have to get another $10K web server in order to do a redirect from geicosucks.com to geico.com
Of course the PHBs won't listen to anyone but the buttmunch who insists that they'd need a new server for a redirect. Funny how the useless and clueless IT people end up in managment.
Forced? According to zipzoomfly, they voluntarily changed their name to better reflect what they do.
0xfeedface
As grim as it sounds, I think that you first have to understand the law in that country first...
AFAIK and IANAL/JNSPUA (Je ne suis pas un avocat), but French law dictates that all advertising cannot be comparative, ie, Evian can't say they're better than Perrier, for example. They have to use non-comparative sales tactics.
So, naturally, extending this policy to the internet, when you lookup GEICO in this case, you should not expect to see their competitors (assuming search == advertising in legal terms). And cosumers in those countries would not expect to see it either.
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Ok. It's clear to me that everyone who responded to my post either A. knows nothing about Adwords or B. did not read the article or C. both. The keywords are used in an ad campaign to show ads that you pay Google to display. Geico sued Google for allowing other companies to use the keyword Geico in their ad campaigns. Geico lost.
Our company put the name of our biggest competitor in our keywords so that if someone search for that company, our ad would show up. Google told us in legal form to stop. In our case, I believe the company we used complained. Since we only spend about $20,000/year on AdWords and that particular keyword probably only made Google $500 out of that $20000, I am sure Google thought it easier to send us a cease and desist instead of risking a lawsuit. In the case of Geico, that keyword most likely generates millions of dollars for Google. That is the reason they went to court.
The moral is: Google is a little more evil today than they were yesterday. (Evil in a Slashdot mentality type of way. I personally do not care.)
ps Other companies use our name in their keywords but we don't complain.
This reminds me of Penthouse sending nasty cease & desist emails to webmasters that included the word "penthouse" in META tags or web content. Webmasters will typically do something like that to try and draw traffic from search engines by using such keywords as "penthouse".