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

I dont see a diffenence

[bird603568]

Could somebody tell me why this is diffrent than on comericals when say Subway uses The whatever-selects. McDonalds own that. Or then McDonalds compairs to Burger Kings wooper? I3 onion rings

Unfair Ruling

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

From the article: The court charged Google with trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising.

Trademark counterfeiting? I really don't see this as being the case. Google is simply a tool by which various links are collected and set out in a presentable manner. Instead of shooting the messenger (Google), it seems to me that a more fair ruling would be to go after the counterfeitters themselves.

Unfair competition? I thought France had a relatively free market? And what exactly *is* "unfair competition" anyway? This aspect of the ruling seems as though it's set out to protect French business interests more than anything else.

Misleading advertising? Once again, it's the advertisers doing the misleading, not Google.

just remove them

[PerlDudeXL]

Google could remove ads + indexed pages. Those who sue Google are not worth it to be found ;)

lets see who's laughing

[dasMeanYogurt]

when google takes them out of their search results. After all why risk another lawsuit when someone else will gladly take those hits.

Re:This is plain stupid.

[tomhudson]

But stores DO charge Coke a fee for "shelf face space" and/or "product presentation".

WalMart is notorious for this, but they only took an existing practice and expanded on it ...

Same with beer companies paying extra to have their brand placed more conveniently, or with more linear feet of exposure.

Tobacco companies pay your local store hundreds of dollars every month so that their package is right behind the cashier, and their competitors' is less visible.

Nobody has a right to be protected from competitors ads if they are not lies.

Re:This is plain stupid.

[Tassach]

So all Google has to do is change a couple lines of code so that the search term "louis vuiton" is ignored, just like it ignores "as", "the", etc.

Google could easily make it a policy that if you sue them, they blacklist you. They have NO obligation (other than to their shareholders) to index your site. It's their servers and their software, so they can do whatever they want with it. Actully, you could even make a strong argument that they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to avoid lawsuits, so blacklisting the trademarks of hostile companies is just good business practice.

If it were me, I'd say something like: You're not happy that your trademarked words can result in your competitors' pages coming back in the search results or adsense? No problem, well make it so that someone entering your trademark as a search term brings up a message that says "The following words are protected trademarks and were not included in your search: $TRADEMARK". Hope you're happy now, asshat.