Google Ruled a Trademark Infringer

Stephan writes "Google lost a trademark-infringement case in France. News.com is reporting that a Paris District Court ruled yesterday against Google in a lawsuit filed by high-end fashion designer Louis Vuitton. The company is suing Google for allowing its competitors to buy targeted ads on the search engine's search results pages that use or are associated with the Vuitton trademark. The court charged Google with trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising. Google was ordered to pay $257,430 (200,000 euros). Google is facing similar lawsuits in different countries. In the United States, the company recently won a favorable ruling in a similar case brought by GEICO, the car insurance company."

Comments

This is plain stupid.

[tomhudson]

What next - being sued because you bought yellow pages advertising on the same page as a competitor?

How the f$ck is this trandemark infringement?

Re:This is plain stupid.

[Moby Cock]

Because they are making money of a trademark they don't own.

It's not complicated.

Re:This is plain stupid.

[tomhudson]

They are selling AD SPACE. If I have a Mazda to sell, I can mention the Mazda trademark in ads. If I buy ad space in the newspaper opposite a full-page Honda ad, or on the same page as a story about GM opening a new plant, that's their tough shit. Sure, my ad will be seen by more people because it's next to something else - that's life.

People doing searches for Louis V-whatever-the-frig-handbags are going to see ads for others - boo hoo.

Re:This is plain stupid.

[squiggleslash]

It's more the case of (to use your example) Ford outbidding Mazda for the advertising space on their name. You search for Mazda and up comes Ford.

I honestly don't think Mazda would mind...

Anyway, I still don't see the issue with respect to Google. You can't buy "all the advertising space" related to your rival with Google, all you can do is have it so your advertising comes up if you search for that rival.

From the point of view of an end user, this is far from evil or misleading. This isn't about people trying to pass themselves off as a company, it's simply marketing to people interested in a particular product. If I search for "Biro", the chances are I want a pen. If I'm searching for something specific to Biro (like "How do I contact them about repairing this pen"), then the relevent links will appear on the left, as always. If I'm looking to buy a biro, then I'll be interested in the unobtrusive links on the right from companies that feel I may be interested in their product. Maybe I would prefer a Parker. Maybe I want to buy the Biro from WHSmiths.

I think the fairest comparison is actually Parker Pens going to a newspaper and saying "When you next do a story concerning Biros, can you put our ad next to it?"

That shouldn't be considered trademark infringment, and it's certainly not evil business practices. Trademarks were intended as a way to guarantee against fraud, as one group passing its products off as the other's. It strikes me that the laws here are being taken to go far beyond that remit, to the point that it threatens speech instead. If they carry on this way, just as the DMCA is undermining the legitimacy of copyright, and software patents the legitimacy of the patent system, they risk undermining trademarks too. Legislatures need to intervene and stop this abuse.

Re:This is plain stupid.

[tomhudson]

First - I'm not from the US (though I had to go down there 4 times a couple of weeks ago).

Second - as another poster pointed out, it's perfectly legal in France to mention competitors in ads, but it hasn't been done until recently.

Third: the article is bullshit. Look at this quote:

"This milestone ruling grants protection for the first time to both consumers and brand owners by finding that Google's Adwords and Premium Sponsorship services as misleading advertising services," the representative added.

How is restricting letting consumers find competitors a "protection to consumers"? It's a boot heel on their neck, by brand owners over-extending their "rights" to help stifle competition, that same competition which is what really benefits consumers.

Fourth: Misleading advertising? The ads were clearly labeled as ads. And, unlike most media, where you have to "contact their media department", google's policies are a click away.

Versus Billboards

[dominator]

IMHO, this is a pretty bogus ruling. The ads are distinct from the regular results and marked as such, so there's little grounds for any of the typical trademark "confusion" statues to apply. I don't think that this case would pass muster in a US court.

In short, I fail to see how Google selling Louis Vuitton adwords to LV's competitors is any different than State Farm putting up billboards across the street from Geico offices or Viagra buying an ad on the page after a Cialis article in Men's magazine. It's nothing more than good business sense. It isn't TM infringement.

Re:Versus Billboards

[dominator]

Here, I have to disagree. Putting up billboards across the street is not the same thing. This is more like putting a phone tap on the line, and setting it up so that each time someone calls Geico, they get an intercept telling them how wonderful State Farm is.

Importantly, nothing gets intercepted, because the main search results still go through to Geico. What's added is a small annotation saying that if you're interested in Geico, you might want to check out State Farm instead.

If rulings like this stand, I think the next rung of lawsuits against search engines happens when Geico isn't the first search hit for "Geico" or if "State Farm" shows up second on the search results page. [tongue-in-cheek]Brand Confusion, I tell you![/tongue-in-cheek] At least in the current case, "State Farm" is marked as an advertisement and displayed *distinctly* from the main results.

What else would rulings like this ban? Miller ads that say - "half the carbs of Bud light" Or "Aleve lasts twice as long as Tylenol"? Comparitive advertisement is a cornerstone of the US marketplace. I understand that it is much less so (if not altogether verboten) in Europe.

In any case, whatever you want to call this, it ain't TM infringement.

Re:Versus Billboards

[DirePickle]

It's more like looking up a company in the yellow pages, and finding competitors' ads right next to it.

Stupid!

[hanssprudel]

Stallman likes to point out that the term "Intellectual Property" is a fallacy in the sense that copyright, patents, and trademarks are very different things that need to be discussed seperately. But one can at least identify one problem that they are all suffering from: courts and lawmakers forgetting their actual purpose, and treating them like they exist to protect incumbant companies.

In the case of Trademark, it's purpose is not to protect companies that take out trademarks, but to protect _consumers_. The point with trademark is that if I want a Coca-Cola, or a Louis-Vuitonn bag, I can be sure that what I buy is actually such a product, and not a cheap knock-off. Without trademark laws, it would be next to impossible to know what you are buying. That this leads to brands with incredible value is entirely incidental, and possibly not entirely positive.

So, in this context, the ruling could not be more stupid. How does it, in any way, hurt the consumer that competitors can advertise under queries for Louis-Vuitonn? As long as the ads are clearly marked as being adds for somebody else (as they are on Google), this will only increase competition and give the consumer more choice.

One can understand why Louis-Vuitton might not like that, but the role of the courts ought not be to do their bidding!

Re:Screw France

[nkh]

There is no anti-americanism in France, it's just a stupid court order. As for the nazi Yahoo auctions, it's just that Europe has a different version of what is free speech, which is comprehensible from a geographical point of view: Germany (with the Hitler guy) is in Europe.

Of course I don't pretend I can explain this court order, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the USA, GWB, the Irak war, the Nazis or an international Jewish/Freemasonry conspiracy, just some trademark issues.

Re:Screw France

[Richie1984]

The fact that they are messed up to begin with...France is irrelevant.

That's rather extreme. Just because the French state has different political views and opinions to you, doesnt mean they are any less valid. We don't know enough about the case to judge whether or not their was any bias, so jumping to these sort of conclusions is not particularly helpful.

Re:Unfair Ruling

[bersl2]

I thought France had a relatively free market?

Choice quote from Wikipedia entry "Economy of France": Government spending, at 53% of GDP in 2000, is the highest in the G-7.

Usually, that's indicative of a planned economy.

The real reason this is stupid

[drinkypoo]

LV is trying to claim that Google, a company which is not beholden to them, has somehow diluted their trademark by associating other companies with it. However, if google didn't index pages linking to them, or their pages, then they wouldn't come up at all. When X is the amount of business driven to LV by google, and Y is the percentage of that business lost by people buying competing (and sometimes knockoff) products, Losing Y percent of X still leaves you with infinitely more profit from that source than you paid for.

In other words, google is a free resource and they have no right to bitch about what ads are shown along google searches for their trademark.

The counterargument is probably that because google is ubiquitous in search, they have an unfair position in the market from which to do things like this. However, they are anything but a monopoly, so that argument really doesn't wash - especially since it's not illegal to sell LV and a competing product in the same store (unless the competing product is illegal anyway) so it makes no sense to make it illegal to mention them together on the same web page. But then, most legal systems since Hammurabi are not based on what makes sense for the most people.