French Courts Fine eBay For Buying Typo Keywords
from the oh-come-on dept
For years, various luxury brands have been furious that others can buy text keyword advertising based on their trademarked terms, leading to a series of lawsuits. In most place, the courts have realized that just buying a trademarked term as a keyword alone is not infringing on someone's trademark. France, however, is the one exception, having ruled against Google. Now, it's also ruled against eBay for supposedly having ads that pointed to eBay whenever anyone searched on a typo/misspelling of any of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy). Apparently, in France, you're not even allowed to misspell a trademarked brand name without official permission...![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
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Filed Under: france, keywords, trademarks, typos
Companies: ebay, lvmh
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Re: Fries, just plain fries
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Looks like the French are getting that condition based on these rulings. If recent French military history is an indicator, I would say "Freedom Fries" was a thank you to the French for not joining us.
"And you wonder why people want to bomb you."
Jealousy.
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http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmy9R_WtPbg
It makes perfect sense.
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Re:
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Alternative motives...?
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spellchedker FTW
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Explain to me ...
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Re: Explain to me ...
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For the simple reason that there's no law that says they can't. Nor should there be. You're apparently under the false impression that the purpose of trademark law is for a company to weild absolute control over their their name and to prevent anyone from making a profit from any use of that name. This may be what many companies want people to believe, but it's quite false. The true purpose of trademark is for consumer protection. It's so that a consumer can be assured that if someone is selling a product with a trademark that the product is really associated with the trademark's company. One company simply referring to another company's trademark is not a violation of this purpose. Are you seriously suggesting that it should be?
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Re: Re: Explain to me ...
if ebay is buying up misspellings of louis vuitton marks, and then linking them to unauthorized auctions (usually they're fake gear), it's trademark infringement. plain and simple.
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Trademark law: Includes the right to defend someone using your name to sell a product but does not give John who sells pants the ability to sue Jon who sells automobiles. Trademark law allows someone to defend their specific mark from use in the same or very similar business.
In this case LVMH should be going after those selling the fake goods, not someone for linking to those fake goods. Ebay bought or used those keywords to help better index its site. It is LVMH's responsibility to go after the people selling the fake goods, you know the ones ACTUALLY doing the infringing. Or perhaps maybe someone might accidentally misspell the name(how dare they do that) and ebay recognized that a lot of people were misspelling certain things in the name and decided to buy those keywords to increase its standings in google or other search engines when someone searched for that misspelling. So no just buying a keyword is NOT trademark infringement, selling goods you are claiming to be an LVMH product is. Something ebay is NOT doing. Or should sites be sued for not policing everything and anything done on their sites because the original company would rather not deal with defending its own trademark.
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Trademark law: Includes the right to defend someone using your name to sell a product
Again, I think that we're in agreement on the underlying principles, but literally there's nothing wrong or illegal with using someone else's trademarked name in the course of selling your product. It happens all of the time. When Target puts out a generic brand, they'll put "Compare to XYZ brand" right on the box. When Company X makes a commercial pointing out that their products are better than Company Y, they can use Company Y's trademark to get the point across. The key is you can use a trademark in the course of selling your product -- regardless of factors like the similarity of the business in the marketplace -- as long as a moron in a hurry wouldn't think that the actual company was selling the product instead of a counterfeiter.
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By my reading, you've essentially paraphrased my description of the purpose of trademark. If you're saying that the "similar course of business" clause is somehow a critical distinction between what I said and what you did, I don't see how that is relevant to the issue.
if ebay is buying up misspellings of louis vuitton marks, and then linking them to unauthorized auctions (usually they're fake gear), it's trademark infringement. plain and simple.
eBay is not presenting itself as Lois Vuitton, so how can this be a trademark violation? A moron in a hurry would know that eBay is not LV. Now, if someone is selling fake LV merchandise, there's your trademark infringement. But how is eBay, a third party, responsible for the actions of the counterfeiters?
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eBay is buying ads from Google based on keywords (misspelled brand names). eBay is then almost certainly not pointing to specific auctions or sellers, but instead showing the results of a search based on the correctly-spelled brand name. So, no...they're not a "passive conduit", but we're not talking about copyright safe harbors here; we're talking about trademark, so their passivity is irrelevant. And personally, I don't see anything wrong with this nor do I think it's illegal.
If LV thinks that eBay is not doing enough to remove counterfeiters from the site, then this is the problem that should be addressed. Not something as tangential as misspelled keywords.
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the fact that it doesn't work in trademark law isn't really the point... (mike advocates it for virtually all third party infringement cases). the point is that ebay is not a passive conduit in this case, so they should be liable.
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Should the person looking to sell a legit LV bag on eBay really be forced to title it “Louis Vuitton Bag – Lois Vuitton Bag – Louis Vuiton Bag – Lois Vuiton Bag” simply to cover possible misspellings? Or does it make sense for eBay to realize that mistakes like this happen and redirect the search?
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Re: Explain to me ...
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A thought
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Going to buy the "visit America" keywords and link it here
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CAN WE REMOVE FRANCE FROM the net NOW?
any french website never visit it
WOOT you go ahead keep your culture
you keep it cause you cant compete otherwise
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eBay
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