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

Abuse of what trademarks are for...

[raehl]

Trademarks are to identify the source of goods. Trademarks are not to protect your good from competition. Nor are the copyrights to protect your trademark from use by others outside of identifying the source of goods.

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.