French Supreme Court Says Buying Adwords On Trademarked Terms Is Not Trademark Infringement

from the about-time dept

Tue, Jul 13th 2010 7:16pm — Mike Masnick

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.

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Filed Under: ads, france, keywords, supreme court, trademark
Companies: google, lvmh

3 Comments

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Hosermage (profile), 13 Jul 2010 @ 8:06pm

Really...
Sometimes I wonder how is human race ever going to advance if we really need to go through that much trouble to state something as obvious as common sense.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jul 2010 @ 1:44am

Re: Really...
common sense is hardly common
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jul 2010 @ 2:12pm

and this proves why the European control over those countries is a bad thing, a sovereign country makes a ruling and some higher "world" court can reverse it, hopefully America never enters into or makes an American Union

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??
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