French Supreme Court Says Buying Adwords On Trademarked Terms Is Not Trademark Infringement
from the about-time dept
Well here's some good news. For many, many years there have been lawsuits around the globe accusing Google of violating trademarks of companies by selling ads based on the trademarked keywords of others. Thankfully, most courts around the world recognized that trademark law is not about giving total control over the words to one party, but about protecting consumers from confusion -- and thus ruled that it was perfectly legal to have ads on trademarked keywords (so long as those ads were not presented in a confusing manner). The one exception was France, which bizarrely ruled against Google. The case was appealed up to the European Court of Justice, who earlier this year said that selling ads on trademarked keywords is not infringement. With that ruling in hand, the French Supreme Court has now ruled in favor of Google and said that Louis Vuitton and others, who were complaining, have no infringement to complain about. This is a good ruling, though not a huge surprise after the EU ruling earlier.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: ads, france, keywords, supreme court, trademark
Companies: google, lvmh
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Really...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Really...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
really deceptive practice, they use your trademark names in their keywords to be high on the list or just buy the sponsored ads at the top
that would be like pizza hut putting a Papa Johns sign out front, not their fault you didn't know it was pizza hut when you came in, right??
[ link to this | view in chronology ]