Google scores a legal win

[mike]

It looks like our good friends at Google may have scored an early round victory in one of the trademark related lawsuits leveled against them. Yesterday, a German court dismissed the case brought against Google by a German corporation called Metaspinner Media. Metaspinner claimed Google was selling one of its trademarked terms as a search result allowing competitors to benefit from their branding. The judge apparently didn’t buy it though so it was auf wiedersehen for them…

Of course, this case is but one of many bottles of bier on the wall for the big G, but take one down and pass it around… Google apparently has bigger things on their minds anyway.

[cthathem]

ouch ;) .. I guess everyone wants a piece of the big cake, huh? didn't quite follow the law suite, but if they are referring to adwords ..

Well, I know of a few 'bad examples' of adwords 'abuse' (you can't quite call it that way, can you?) too... like sites that link for a country name, and then do hate speeches against that country. Well, google won't bother anyway... :)

Auf Nimmerwiedersehen & pfiat di god ;)
ctha

[DrTandem1]

I didn't follow the lawsuit either, because I thought it was frivolous. I seem to remember reading that Google will remove unauthorized trademarks from AdWords and AdSense, but not from displaying a site in its results that has used the trademark within its source code such as the keyword meta tag.

I barely remember the German lawsuit that was just settled. I seem to recall that they were unhappy that other companies were displayed in the search results after a searcher used a term they had trademarked. Really stupid.

Almost every word imaginable has been trademarked to one extent or another. If a lawsuit like that succeeded, there would be no more search engines.

[cthathem]

:) .. well, wouldn't make much sense to complain about companies showing up on the SERPs for your companies copyrighted words, would it? ..

It would be a bit different if some other company would actually pay (AdWords) to show up on 'your' company/product name (not on regular keywords). Yet, that's what the whole business seams to be about anyway. And since noone can draw a line between regular keywords and 'copyrighted' ones.. it will always go on that way, I guess.

It's ridiculous to complain about having other companies show up on SERPs for 'your' keyword (as if there actually were something like property-SERPs) ..

[daxesh]

"It would be a bit different if some other company would actually pay (AdWords) to show up on 'your' company/product name (not on regular keywords). "

I very much believe it to be true and the thing is we can't do anything.