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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."
It would probably be more cost effective for Google to just buy Rosetta Stone and shut it down. Sales are obviously down - but at the prices they charge, that's hardly surprising.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
To quote DNA.... the "Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard".
Admittedly, I had thought the same when I first heard the name "Google". It is not a bad association. Maybe DNA made the same mistake or decided that "Googolplex" didn't sound as nice.
(disclaimer, my employer is Google)
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
I did find it humorous that, in a search for 'Rosetta Stone', the actual artifact doesn't appear until 3/4 of the way down the first page. At least it shows up on the first page. I noticed the following stats:
Links regarding actual Rosetta stone artifact: 5
Links regarding Rosetta Stone Inc.: 15
Links to other language translator companies: 4
Number of above links that actually looks like trademark infringement: 1 (www.Rosetta.StoneLanguages.com)
Other Rosetta Stone links (Rock band, unix based translator, Mac OS X ppc emulator): 3
So, Rosetta Stone Inc wants to sue Google for Trademark Violation. How about the British Museum, which holds the real Rosetta Stone, sues this upstart for using Rosetta Stone as it's trademark? Or the Egyptian government, which certainly has a better claim on the stone, which was looted by the Brits in the 1870's? Given all the confusion that already exists because this translation company has appropriated to itself the name Rosetta Stone, when there also exist the real Rosetta Stone, "The Rosetta Stone of immunology", "Arabidopsis, the Rosetta Stone of flowering time (fossils)", an algorithm for predicting protein structure from sequence is named Rosetta@home, and in molecular biology, a series of "Rosetta" bacterial cell lines have been developed that contain a number of TRNA genes that are rare in E. coli but common in other organisms, enabling the efficient translation of DNA from those organisms in E. coli. "Rosetta" is also an online language translation tool to help localisation of software, developed and maintained by Canonical as part of the Launchpad project, "Rosetta" is the name of a "lightweight dynamic translator" distributed for Mac OS X by Apple that enables applications compiled for a RISC processor (PowerPC) to run on Apple systems using a CISC (x86) processor. The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages. As well as being the name of the original Rosetta Stone, the term has come to mean something critical to decryption or translation. Rosetta Stone Inc should be ashamed of themselves...
For those who skimmed TFA:
Last month, Google changed its policy stating that "advertisers will be allowed to use trademark terms in their ad text even if they do not own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it," Rosetta Stone said
The problem is NOT Google infringing upon the trademarks that Rosetta Stone holds. 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. I'm confused though, as to why Google JUST now started to allow this. If it was a no-brainer back when Adwords started, wouldn't they have allowed it at that point? Sounds to me like Adwords revenue was down, and allowing the use of non-approved trademarks in ads made the Adsword space that much more appealing in hopes of getting people off the fence when evaluating their advertising budget.
But do competitors have the right to profit using your own trademark? That's more the case in point. It's not that they are doing it better. It's that they are using the name recognition of the Rosetta Software to peddle their own product.
I don't necessarily agree with you. In general on your points I do. Provide a better service, a cheaper service, etc... I just don't know if you can apply it here. This is different.
Why is it that we let companies trademark words which are already in the common lexicon?
Not to defend the Rosetta Stone's asinine lawsuit here, but trademark law (in theory) only lets companies control pre-existing words to the extent that they identify its product. Trademark law does not let them restrict all uses of the mark.
So Rosetta Stone company's trademark does not prevent you from saying things like,
"I visited the Rosetta Stone."
"Bob is as helpful to us as the Rosetta Stone was for egyptologists!"
or even
"Taking the Berlitz foreign language course was like finding the Rosetta Stone for me!"
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
There is a difference between referencing a trademark in your advertisement and using that trademark to sell your product. For example, it is acceptable to say my shoes are better than Nikes, but it is not acceptable for me to sell my shoes under Nikes name. IMHO, allowing Google to redirect trademark searches to a competitors site is a trademark violation.
So if I search for "ford honda mazda" which search results should I get then? None? I think it's fundamentally flawed to assume that just because I search for brand name(s) I shouldn't get an ad that says "See the new Toyota 2009 models". I think it's perfectly fair that companies can advertise to say "Hey, we're an alternative to $foo that you just searched for". Comparing it to selling under a competitor's name is comparing apples and pink flamingos.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If I walk into a store and ask the clerk, "where's the Rosetta Stone software" the shelf he will direct me to has the competing software RIGHT NEXT to it, perhaps with stickers bragging how much better it is than Rosetta.
Trying to get your software to show up when somebody googles a competitor is the same thing.
And if you think it is different because they are paying Google for it, the same thing happens in stores(pay-for-placement on shelves) and in newspaper ads. Every magazine I've dealt(admittedly only a dozen or so) with let me buy an ad on the facing page from a competitor's ad, some would even call me up pro-actively if I'd bought space from them before.
It's not just competitors, it's also pirate sites. If you're an internet newbie and you google "Rosetta Stone" and the first link is "Download Rosetta Stone cheap, only $6.95" but the second link is legitimate, you would most likely hit the first link - it's cheaper, it's right up there on Google and it's in the sponsored links, so it has to be reputable, and you have now become an unwitting customer to commercial software pirates.
From experience I'll tell you that Rosetta Stone isn't very good. The principle of learning by induction by seeing captioned pictures and repeating voiced words is a poor one. They say it's how a child learns their first language, but:
1) Children take YEARS to reach any reasonable standard in their first language.
2) Children learn the mistakes in their grammar by free interaction with their parents and others. Where mistakes will be verbally corrected, and questions of confusion can be asked and answered.
3) Children have a far greater supply of stimulus in their immersive environment, not just multi-choice pictures.
I found learning with RS to be extremely slow. And when you start wondering about the rules of grammar in different tenses or whatever, the software has no way of spelling out the rule for you. It seems to be a case of taking weeks to learn to talk like a baby.
I've also tried Pimsleur, which is a CD course, and it's better than Rosetta stone - judged on the basis of learning more of the language quicker.
But the best of the three by a large margin was Michel Thomas's 8 CD language course. This gives a good basis of the language in a few days.
Michel Thomas is also several times cheaper than Rosetta Stone.