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Rosetta Stone Sues Google For Trademark Violation
adeelarshad82 writes that earlier this week "Rosetta Stone, Inc. filed a lawsuit against Google Inc in a US federal court, alleging trademark infringement. In the lawsuit, the company alleged that Google is allowing third parties, including individuals involved in software piracy, to purchase the right to use its trademarks — or other 'confusingly similar' terms — in Google's Adwords advertising program."
I work in internet advertising (one of the very numerous google adwords certified individuals and so on) and see problems from this nearly weekly.
Your competitor (or even a scam site) begins advertising when people search for your company? Not much you can do about it. They even reference to your company in ad description? Still not much you can do about it.
Technically you can apply for protections concerning your trademark but they only work for specific terms (ie: What you've trademarked. Any typos, product names you haven't specifically registered, slang words that people use about your product but aren't exactly the trademark, etc. can't be protected) and even then, if Google rejects the application, there is little you can do.
You can't even contact them. Google AdWords certified companies have a specific individual as their contact person for Google but for anyone not using services by one of us... They can mail Google and get a copypaste answer that doesn't help anything at all. Or they can go to google webmasters' area and make a thread about it (though that usually helps even less)...
So, yeah. The problem does exist.
Like Google?
No, You're thinking of a googol, admittedly the founders of Google thought they were naming their company after 1*10^100, but they accidentaly got it wrong
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
The problem with this is that the museum that's is in possession of the fossil can't market it self using the name and picture of the thing... That's just not right...
That's true; it's just not right. Assuming that by "right" you mean "correct": The Natural History Museum of Oslo can, and does, advertise Ida with the name and picture.
The issue is that Google is now willingly allowing Joe Schmuck, a competitor, to use trademarks to their own benefit. This seems like a pretty obvious infringement issue.
Except for the fact that Joe Schmuck has every right to use his competitor's trademark in any way he sees fit, provided he does not attempt to confuse said trademark with his own product.
Buying the "Rosetta Stone" adword and putting in the add "Professional Language Learning Software" is perfectly legit and legal so long as the add does not imply that the language learning software company you are going to is Rosetta Stone.
If they dress up the web site to look very similar to the Rosetta Stone website, or are using their colors to confuse visitors, or are implying that they are affiliated with Rosetta Stone, they have Trademark Infringement. However, if they are simply saying "try us instead" or "we are better/cheaper/whatever than Rosetta Stone" then it isn't infringement. It's a legitimate use.
Google's policy, as far as I know, does not permit this and if they find out the ad gets pulled, because it is illegal. What Google was doing before was simply making it extremely difficult for infringement to occur by not allowing companies to buy the adwords of trademarks they don't own. That they can now does not mean doing so is automatically trademark infringement. You have to misrepresent yourself as your competitor to infringe trademark, and buying and using a trademarked adword doesn't even come close to doing that by itself.
IANAL, but there are a lot of trademark cases that support this, even one recently involving Google Adwords.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
But at the same time, what's the problem with someone saying if you like "Starkist, you should try Shodee!". There's nothing confusing there. They are clearly offering a different brand of Tuna. It's not reasonable to sue the newspaper for carrying Shodde's ad.
If we are going to allow common words to be trademarked for products, then those trademarks need to be very narrow. In any event, the fair use of trademarks needs to be quite broad (just short of claiming your product is actually someone else's).
I suppose the question should have been "why do we allow corporations to trademark common words and then sue everyone who dares to utter that word in a commercial context?".
It runs on Mac but don't expect to really learn a language with this. I've gone through all levels in Rosetta Stone (French). It doesn't go beyond the very basic level. Does introduce you to the proper accent.
I actually learned French from Ollendorff's book published in 1851! Amazing why his method which is so effective isn't followed in any other language books that I've seen. I think he also has a book on Spanish. Check it out on Google books and a hard copy is also available on Amazon.