New Legal Threat To GMail

wellington writes "Google is facing a renewed threat of legal action from a company that claims to own the intellectual property rights to its GMail e-mail service. Independent International Investment Research, a British company that specialises in research and has several leading City investment banks as clients, argues that it launched "G-Mail web based email" in May 2002."

Comments

Aaarrgggh!

[gowen]

intellectual property rights to its GMail e-mail service.

Look, if you keep using the catch-all phrase "Intellectual Property" to cover distinct ideas, no one will ever get smart about the differences. This is about a trade mark "GMail" -- only the *name* is the important thing here.

And they did register that trademark long in advance of Google.

Re:Aaarrgggh!

[AKAImBatman]

try marketing your Micro-soft operating system and see how long that "but we had a hyphen!" argument holds up.

You might be able to get away with it if you use significantly different styling for the logos. e.g. Microcenter could cause brand confusion if they styled their brands in such a way as to make the consumer believe that they were a Microsoft company.

However, a judge would probably find that you were attempting to cause brand confusion based on the shear popularity of the Microsoft mark.

In this case, however, my understanding is that Google didn't learn of the mark until a month after they launched their service. In addition, the two services operate in different markets. So Google has a strong case in that the two services are unlikely to be confused, and that Google has been using the mark in good faith.

Doesn't matter. The Firebird database is a niche item, but they'd still have won a trademark case with Mozilla Firebird.

I wish people would stop repeating nonsense like this. As with many legal threats, there was no court case. Since there was no court case, there was no determination of brand validity. Since there was no determination of brand validity, there is no legal precident steming from the issue.

The most that could come out of it is that if Firebird (database) ever went to court over their name again, they could claim that Mozilla decided to settle because they believed in the validity of Firebird's claims. (In reality Mozilla just didn't want any trouble, so they picked a truely unique name.)

Re:Why so long

[Enigma_Man]

If you RTFA, you will see that the company is a small company, and was involved in communication with google over the span of 15 months or so, before jumping right into litigation. That sounds like the right thing to do, IMO, rather than just sue immediately. The company is a small one, and they say they don't have the big money that Google has to bring a law suit just to protect their name.

-Jesse

Re:Sounds legitimate

[kubrick]

It's the X Window System, not X-Windows as you claim.

The letter 'G'

[Baric]

'mail' is a generic term. G is just a letter, devoid of any meaning beyond a possible abbreviation. In this case, it's a legitimate abbreviation for 'Google'. This reminds me of IBM trying to trademark the number 2 to stop vendors from making PS/2 compatible computers called "PC/2" They lost. Intel tried to trademark the number 386 & 486. They also lost. I'm not a google apologist or anything, but I think the litigants don't have a case

Re:G?

[Pius II.]

The German telecom already owns the T. They sued everybody who had a T in their trademark or web adress. That includes owners of domains such as "t-beutel.de" ("tea-bag.de"). They also have a trademark on the colour magenta (yes, the M in CMYK) and have been known to sue people using it in advertisements (a common practice for magazines where you pay per colour used).

Re:Google owns the GMAIL mark, at least in the US

[canajin56]

Here is the UK trademark website. If you search it, you'll find the earliest application is from Google, Inc. on April 14th, 2004. Karen Griffith applied on October 4th, 2004, almost half a year later.

So there you go. In the USA, Google applied first, and with an earlier date of first use to boot. Google quickly followed up and applied in the UK as well. These guys, supposedly BASED in the UK, didn't bother for another 6 months. Further, their only reference in their UK application was to their US application. If that application was rejected, the UK one will be too, I would imagine.