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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."
"Known" in informal usage is one thing. Actually marketed that way is quite another. Would you expect to see Pepsi brand "coke" or Dyson brand "hoovers" being advertised?
If you allow your trademark to become a generic term, then eventually you may lose the protection it provides. Trademarks are defend-it-or-lose-it. I say may lose because AFAIK this particular principle, of using a trademarked term as a generic term in a commercial search, is a new legal area. So at least we know that a lot of lawyers will make a lot of money out of it. Which is nice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Coke.. okay, maybe. Hoover? I never hear anyone say, "go get the Hoover."
I do hear people say, "thats a nice Ipod", when I have a Sansa. Even more frequently: Kleenex being substituted for tissue, or, "will you xerox this for me?".
There are much better examples than Hoover and Coke... those arn't even the ones that spring to mind when I think of popularized eponyms.
If I put "lastminute.com" into Google, they've got about the top 6 links in the search page. The URL of their competitors is clearly shown elsewhere.
Are lastminute.com in trouble? Have they got SCO-level management fighting against the reality than anyone can set up what they do (and a lot of their site isn't "last minute" anyway).
You know what's funny? The most likely impact of this move is that more people will link to this slashdot article and drive this up the main index, to the detriment of them.
Sorry! Kleenex lost it's trademark ability because it allowed everyone to call their tissues kleenex's also.
Same with xerox. And aspirin. Jell-o. And even "google" to mean generally an online search.
That is why when you have a powerful trademark, you sue anyone who comes close to your territory like this - even if you might lose. If you don't, you dilute your trademark and possibly lose your trademark (at least partially) and have it become genericized.
Now Google is facilitating genericizing of trademarks.
I would be *pissed* and would probably sue Google to STOP doing that.
That's not the point. The point is the phone book calls them plumbers; it doesn't list them under a brand name (like whatever the equivalent is for Tesco's in plumbing.) Tesco would have no case if a Google search for "supermarkets" threw up ads for non-Tesco supermarkets. What they object to is a customer searching for "Tesco" and being advertised something else. Whether their objection is valid is a matter of debate but there's no analogy with the phone book.
> One company spends a fortune building a brand image and is so successful that it is *their* product's name that is the first thing you
> think of when you think of the generic product, and yet you think it's ok to use produce results for their competitors too?
It's ok. I want a vacuum cleaner. I google for Hoover, and see other sorts of vacuum cleaner. Because, although Hoover is a type of vacuum cleaner, there are others. Having a trademark doesn't mean other, unconnected companies - especially those you are profitting from - have to pretend that it's the only one of a kind.
You do see these stories about companies who don't understand how to use robots.txt, from time to time. I'm wondering which one will be the first to cause Google to go `sod it - why are we spending money on this` and just remove them from their index.
Of course it's ok. Google can produce whatever results they want. Just because a company has spent a lot of money doesn't mean they're owed anything.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
If Google responds with "We're sorry your are unhappy with our list of your company, we will of course remove all references/links to your company from our listings. And BTW, for now on the results listing your competitors were not matched by using your trademark, but rather by data about what links people clicked on in the past after searching for a specific string."
Personally, I do think it is wrong to bombard someone searching for a JohnWidget with SallyImitation Ads. Phrased another way, "If you don't want to lose customers, you'll pay us to display your ads instead." There are a lot of examples of this same pattern. Like when the phone company charges you extra to not list and distribute you number to all the telemarketers. Like if you don't pay your "protection" money... Well you get the point.
It's not a copyright issue, but rather one of principal. It has become an all too common, and too frequently accepted practice to push people away from what they wanted based on revenue (under the guise of 'for their benefit').
Businesses aren't to blame. The herds of mindless drones that not only don't think for themselves, but accept this tactic are to blame. That's why businesses do it, because it works. Consider this the next time you try to get a drink at a drive-thru and have to repeat that you only want a drink five times while they try to sell you their entire menu.
There are two cases here. One is that you search for a product and get adverts for competitors products. This seems absolutely fine to me. The other is that you get a product and get an advert which appears to be someone selling this product but is, in fact, a competitor (or something completely unrelated). This is absolutely not fine, and is something I have experienced with Google search results several times in the past. Had I been the owner of the trademark, I would have been obliged to sue Google (and probably eBay, who is responsible for many of these) or risk losing the trademark.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But I agree in part. If you search for the term 'Coke' and 'Pepsi' comes in second in the advertiser list, what does that mean? It means Pepsi is benefiting from the Coke trademark. They are in essence advertising their product using the trademark. Maybe google isn't the one to go after though, maybe it would be Pepsi for paying to advertise their product using the Coke brand name. I see no problem if Google returns Pepsi.com anywhere in the search results (even on top).
Think about it this way. Would it be OK for Adidas to take a full page ad in the newspaper with 'Nike' in big letters and "New Adidas store opening Saturday at 3475 Greenwood Ave."?
New Google slogan: Relevance is irrelevant!
Do no evil? Yeah right. When I google for "hoover" I get ads for Oreck. When I google for "google" I only get ads for google.... [I turned off my ad filters long enough to check.]
Seriously, I stopped using other search engines because the first half of the results page were ads posing as results. It looks like Google will soon make the same mistake as all the others.
Well it's about presentation and money changing hands. I do not think my company "owns" any particular use of Google's database or search traffic that it generates. But if a potential customer is looking for my brand and is being directed by Google at one of my competitors, and money is changing hands for this to happen - well I call that passing off. You might not be misled but I think enough people might be.
My gripe is with my competitors who are paying for this to happen, not Google in the first instance. But Google had better tread carefully if they're intending to reverse their position on trademark-based advertisements- I think they may have to delineate sponsored links more clearly and with a certain amount of legal boilerplate if they get away with it at all.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Well, it's kind of hard to organize like this with the printed page. Too many combinations of "searches" for specific trade marked names. However, with dynamically generated content backed by a database it's a breeze.
I bet if the yellowpages had an online site, they'd do the exact same thing.....oh wait, they do: http://www.yellowpages.com/nationwide/name_search/wal-mart?search_mode=all&search_terms=wal+mart
Look at the right side of the page, a long list of "Related Businesses".