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."

Comments

Yes but it is a valid concern

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Since 196BC

[VJ42]

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