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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."
... and didn't it fail?
There's no place like localhost
In other news, Egyptians sue over confusion with ancient cultural artifact.
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.
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.
In a quick google search, 80% of the ads were either put there by Rosetta Stone themselves, or an affiliate of the company. They are still buying all the ad words, they were probably just upset that their cost of advertising went up suddenly when other people wanted those same words. I don't blame them, I would be upset too. Of course that doesn't mean they should get their way......
I have no idea whether what they are doing is legal or not, and I'll bet there has never been a court case like this ever, nor is there a law that covers it directly.
Qxe4
In other other news, Goths sue over confusion with 90's Liverpudlian jingly-guitar dancefloor doom merchants who frequently tickled the top end of the indie & dance charts.
http://www.myspace.com/undertherosettastone
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
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.
In Norway someone trademarked the name "Ida" and a drawing of the now famous fossil. They sell suitcases. 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...
Yeah, I wonder if Rosetta Stone will sue the British Museum for blatantly displaying and advertising that they are in possession of the Rosetta Stone.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
It's sort of ironic that of all the people complaining the one here is the Rosetta Stone inc.
it's ironic on several levels. first, they are pilfering their very name from the public domain. (now they think the concept can apply to no others?) Second, it's a very very commonly used name. I know of many many companies using it, many of them in the same domain of study (e.g. biotech).
but perhaps most of all is that original Rosetta Stone itself's place in history was inference process of transitive association: "this well known thing, is the same as this lesser known thing". which is exactly what google is selling. you search for one thing and it, esepcially ad sense, returns other related things that might be substitutable but with a different origin and previously unknown to you.
they should reflect on why they called themselves rosetta stone.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The French looted the Rosetta Stone from the wall of a fort in Egypt while trying to strengthen the place.
The whinging Poms nicked it while the cheese-eating surrender monkeys were trying to smuggle it out and decided to keep it safe in the one place the Frenchies didn't have access to. Old Blighty.
The Egyptians have since rebuilt the wall with stones looted from a temple near Karnak.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Google is a bastardization of "Googol", a very large number. It entered the lexicon after the word's existence.
"Googol" in turn appears to a bastardization of Google
Being able to trademark "Rosetta Stone" in the domain of translation is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard
Even worse: trying to secure trade dress protection for game rules that are common in computer puzzle games. In a lawsuit, The Tetris Company names nine elements that, when taken together, are distinctive to Tetris. But all but one (pieces made up of four unit squares connected on their sides) are also present in Dr. Mario, and several are present in Puyo Pop, Pac-Attack, and numerous other falling block games.
I think I'll trademark just "Stone" for a company that sells rocks
Or how about "Staples" for a retail store that sells office supplies such as stapler refills?
I wonder if Rosetta Stone will sue the British Museum for blatantly displaying and advertising that they are in possession of the Rosetta Stone.
Unless a trademark is famous enough for dilution protection (e.g. Coca-Cola, McDonald's golden arches, Nike's swoosh), trademark infringement usually requires that the goods or services be in the same field. Rosetta Stone software and Rosetta Stone archaeological artifacts are not.
Get back to us when they do that. With a specific example that we can all try.
You might want to look up "redirect" in a dictionary, just in case you're using it with an entirely different meaning to every educated English speaker on the planet.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and start making your product better and cheaper.
That's easy. Just outsource to China.
Deleted
I remember my supervisor saying a few months ago that a competitor had bought google ads using our companies trademark as a keyword, and google then quickly removed them at our request. I wonder if the meat of the suit is the "confusingly similar", or ads that say "just like Rosetta Stone"?
The solution is to stop trying to find a way to keep your customers from learning about competitors and start making your product better and cheaper.
No. We are talking about scam sites. Rosetta is complaining about illegal sites selling their product illegally being capable of advertising through google's services.
I can go to an online shop selling Nike shoes. If they have google Ads, there is a high chance Ads of fake Nike sellers will appear. If I am Nike, I am competing with criminals. If I am a shopper, I may get conned into buying fake merchandise.
This is not a free market issue.
The question at hand is competitors having ads shown when someone searches for "Rosetta stone" not when they search for "language software".
If Coke puts a commerical out saying 'Pepsi is horrible, drink Coke' Pepsi doesn't/can't sue Coke for using its trademark... It's that simple, how do these guys think they have a case
This is a bit more as though Pepsi redesigned its packaging to look a bit like Coke's, then started a series of commercials showing that packaging and claiming it's Coke, to trick Coca-Cola fans into buying it. But even that analogy isn't quite on the spot: It's more as though Pepsi registered Coka-Cola.com, and Google suggested and sold ads linking to it when folks search for "Coke" or "Coca-Cola", with a line like "Enjoy delicious Coke here!"
If Google restricted trademarks in their ads to clear comparatives, like the FTC mandates in all advertising media, there would be no problem. From here, it looks like they are indeed encouraging flagrant trademark violations, in clear violation of FTC rules. Similar suits in other media have been successful, and some of the penalties are statutory. I'm no lawyer, but I'd guess these guys and the seven other similar pending suits have viable cases.
So? A trademarks doesn't give the holder any control over a word. I can say "Linux is better than Windows", and there's nothing MS can do about it. I can even bid on "Windows" as a search term, and say "Looking for Windows? Get Linux, it's better."
Trademark is intended solely to stop one company from representing its products as being another company's products. If a company doesn't pretend they're SELLING Rosetta Stone products, there should be no problem referencing their competitor... and that's GOOD.
Well, what does that have to do with software???
Now someone looking for information about the Rosetta Stone in the museum may *actually* have been looking for translation software.
So Google will show, along with the museum and info about the REAL Rosetta Stone, they will show language software. Including Rosetta Stone Inc and anyone else who wants to associate themselves with the term "Rosetta Stone" even when they have nothing to do with the British Museum.
Maybe they shouldn't name themselves after a common item in the field if they don't want competitors to use their trademark. It shouldn't matter anyway if their product wasn't so extremely overpriced. I've looked at RS but it is $500-$1000. There is no way I'd pay that. It also doesn't run on Mac OS so I'd have to run it in virtualization which is a pain. It's like Photoshop/Illustrator. Sure it's a good product but at those prices most people just can't afford it. Then they complain that they get pirated or people buy cheaper competitor products.
I suggest they price Rosetta Stone Level 1 packages at $50 each. That is what most people are going to be interested in and that's how much most people can pay. For each higher level charge more as by then people are already familiar with your product and if they need the higher levels they'll usually have some reason to pay for it. (Such as their employer is covering the expense.)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This is a bad analogy as Google does not alter their search results for advertisers. The ads are displayed *beside* or *above* the results, and are clearly marked.
A better analogy would be if LG paid Best Busy so that whenever someone came in and asked about a Sony TV, Best buy had to also tell them "also, just FYI, we have this LG model".
I don't see anything wrong with that whatsoever.
> From here, it looks like they are indeed encouraging flagrant trademark violations, in
> clear violation of FTC rules.
The FTC has no authority over trademarks.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The FTC has no authority over trademarks.
Yes, they do, if that trademark is used in advertising. See my link above.
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.
Seriously, let everyone sue everyone else, so progress can occur and we can all come to a complete standstill. Perhaps then we can rid ourselves of this nonsense once and for all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I agree, but most of the world doesn't have it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The actual complain text can be found here. It is surprisingly free of legalease and you can skim over it fairly quick.
PS: I love the fact that this story shows a big Rosetta Stone ad being served by google!
Step 1: Trademark a common term
Step 2: Sue google
Step 3: ????
Step 4: Profit!
Actually, it *does* run natively on the Mac. That said, it's still a bit pricey.
Google should buy the British Museum (home of the real Rosetta Stone) and sue them back.
That's a shortsighted comment. Let's say I create a craptastic product named iPwn, and when someone searches Google for iPhone, he sees an adwords ad for iPwn. In this case, I've leeched off iPhone's brand value to sell my own wares. Apple spent millions/billions to create/promote the iPhone brand and now I get to rake in the profits at Apple's expense.
It's not just the words though. It's the page that the user gets directed to that should determine intent.
If that result directed me to the iPwn page with a side-by-side comparison to the iPhone and if the iPwn had a distinct look that set it apart from Apple then, in my opinion, there's no foul.
On the other hand, if the iPwn site is a direct ripoff of the Apple site and/or the Apple product isn't even mentioned on the page the user is directed to, then there is a problem.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
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.
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.
No need to read any further than parent. EOF.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Fake sites pretending to be legit is a completely different issue than a real competitor getting exposure, you shouldn't conflate them.
I wouldn't want others using my trademarks to falsely represent themselves as me, but I wouldn't mind them used as triggers for ads. I should be so lucky that any company I work with has such strong brands that competitors have to pay to buy ads for my trademarks because they don't get as good an ROI on their own trademarks.
Equally so, I'd expect it'd save more in tech support costs to lose any customer dumb enough to believe they could get a legit product for two orders of magnitude less in download-only form from "Roysatta4less.freesites.co.cz"
Wouldn't payed advertising for illegal stuff be illegal anyway? I'd be surprised if not. No need to invoke trademark protection, then.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What are you saying here? That the person would mistakenly buy iPwn? Or that the person changes his mind and buys the iPwn due to whatever reason? If you mean the first scenario that I don't buy that for one second. You can't demand that people should be protected from idiocy. If I'm looking for a brand which a) I don't know what it looks like, and b) I don't know what it's called, I will damn sure make enough research (2 whole minutes of painful searching on google/wikipedia or whatever site) before I click buy. You can't protect everybody. People have to meet a certain standard to be protected and this standard isn't much to ask for, such as being able to read. If you're talking about the second scenario I see no reason why it's wrong. Sure Apple paid a lot of money to advertise their products, and that's what they did. They advertised their products. Either you try to protect anything that's even remotely related to iPhone, or you inform people that just because it says iSomething it doesn't make it the same product. After that it's up to each person to either don't give a fuck and buy the wrong product, or listen up and learn. Stop wiping peoples asses. I know they tell you that they can't do it themselves but they're lying.
I am the lawn!
I see you are completely missing the point of trademarks. That is the point: prevent people from abusing YOUR name and reputation. It is there to prevent other people's undesider association with you: both positive and negative. There should be limits to trademark protection, of course (for example everyone who's not in the same business, e.g. newspapers, bloggers, etc, should be allowed to say anything they want about a product) but this is crossing the line - people are directly associating and advertising a competing product to your product.
That is: I don't want my competitor to attack me directly, possibly with lies, because that's unfair.
Now, whether or not it's Google's problem, that's another thing. They should probably get closer in touch with the community. I waited a few months (!) for my Adsense application approval, and even when I asked question about it, it took a few weeks for a Googler to respond.
If you read the slashdot paragraph again, you'll see it mentions software piracy specifically. Yes, it i reasonable for the public and the Rosetta Stone company to be protected from this. Software piracy company can't always be successfully pursued directly as it may well be in a foreign country where copyright breach is tolerated. But it's perfectly reasonable for Rosetta Stone to seek to stop Google from advertising pirated copies of their products to people searching for Rosetta Stone.
In the more general case of a true competitor with a different language learning software, then I agree that they should e allowed to advertise against the keywords "Rosetta Stone".
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.
I read the summary, however I was replying to the parent. That's kind of how this works. Even though all replies are due to be related to the article, they aren't all supposed to be a direct response to it and I merely poked a hole in the example that I replied to.
Still if Google is advertising pirated software then it is simply promoting a black market -- illegal trade. You are not allowed to advertise illegally obtained merchandise at all. This is so beyond trademark issues that it is absurd to even bring it to discussion. The problem at hand here is promoting illegitimate software, regardless of trademark infringement, and should be treated as such.
I am the lawn!
Google is not selling anybody trademarks.
Nobody can, after paying Goolge some money, use those trademarks to advertise their products and services.
Google is selling ads, and they are facilitating the ad placement by telling you which information will exist in the same page.
That is not trademark violation by any sane definition....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When is Andrew Elditch going to sue Rosetta Stone for stealing his sound?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
"Abusive"?
I've imagined it. I can't imagine why you think that's at all like the situation under discussion here.
You do know that the *ads* are clearly displayed sparate from the *results*, don't you? When that ceases to be the case - when I click on a result link that says oracle.com and it takes me to sap.com, then you might have a point. But it it ain't so you don't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If it was published in 1851 it's in the public domain and you should be able to find a copy on the internet.
Free Martian Whores!
The article doesn't give any examples, and when I Google Rosetta Stone, I see no fraudulent ads. I see things like "Foundation Stone Learn Turkish software: Way cheaper than Rosetta Stone". and "$550? Beware the Stone! Spanish Language DVDs at affordable prices!!!" That's if you find the competitors under the sea of cnet amazon ebay and other affiliates trying to earn some comission from linking to the genuine real software.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Google has created an entirely new piece of virtual real estate in terms on on-line ads, and now Rosetta Stone (how can they even own that term?) claims that they own land on it. I think RS is full of crap and if they wanted to use the term there then they should have bought it. I hope that the courts slap them down HARD.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The article doesn't give any examples, and when I Google Rosetta Stone, I see no fraudulent ads.
The most glaring one is "Rosetta.StoneLanguages.com", with the tag "Rosetta Language - 60% off". That ain't Rosetta Stone, and it seems to've been tricky enough to trick even you while you were looking for it.
Seems like RS is just looking for a scape goat as their income falls. What next? They gonna sue Google for global warming? They just need to keep it in their pants.
Really? I've looked multiple times. If it does run on Mac then it should be a lot easier to find out... Since you mentioned it I went back and looked and now see one line after about six clicks that shows it will run on Mac OS. They should have system specs easier to find.
Thanks for the info though.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
When you buy Pepsi at the grocery store, there's a good chance that Coke has paid them to have the register print off a coupon for Coke for you.
In any case, you don't sue the service provider. It's not Google's job to know what you think you own as far as search terms. You sue the company that offends you. Maybe you win. Maybe you get a little common sense stomped into you.
coffee | nose > keyboard