Google To Be Sued in UK For Trademark-Linked Ads

nuke-alwin writes "Channel 4 news in the UK is reporting that Google will be sued by Lastminute.com for the way it sells advertising. Adverts from competitors will now be displayed when searching for some trademarks. Google says consumers will benefit. Some trademarks become so familiar that all similar products are known by the trademark name: Coke and Hoover, for example. I think searching for these kinds of words should allow competitors to advertise their similar products."

Comments

Re:Abuse of what trademarks are for...

[allcar]

You're quite right. Looking further into the article, Tesco (a major supermarket - think WalMart for the UK) is considering action, too.

In a statement, Tesco also said that it is "disappointed at Google's recent changes to their trademark policy as we think that consumers are the people who will be disadvantaged." Now, what kind of screwy logic leads them to think that when searching for Tesco and being presented with ads for a bunch of supermarkets could lead to consumers being disadvantaged? How thick do they think consumers are?
This has got to be to the consumers advantage. It lets us know what other companies operate in the same domain. OK, for supermarkets, this is pretty obvious, but less so for, say, Tool Hire. If I want to know about tool hire companies, I could type HSS and get a list of relevant companies, simply because I know of one. Poor example, as I could have just searched on "Tool Hire", but you take my point, I hope.

Re:Abuse of what trademarks are for...

[mattbee]

Yes - trademarks are to identify the source of goods, and anyone misrepresenting their goods as yours may be guilty of passing off at least under UK law. In our very early days we had a competitor of ours place a ads on searches for our company name, with the text shouting about similar services without mention of ours or the competitor's name. We objected to Google, and they took the competitor's ads away.

Google offer a search service and presented adverts for a competitor when customers searched for our company name. I didn't feel that Google's presentation (i.e. the word "Sponsored links" in small print) made clear enough to potential searchers that the advert was unrelated to our company, and there was a risk of a consumer thinking that this competitor was in fact us. If it had said "These advertisements may be unrelated to the trademark XXX" in clearer text, I'm not sure I would have had the same objection. I think it was a mild attempt at passing off, so I'm glad Google had this policy in place.