As Expected, Rosetta Stone Loses Badly To Google In Claiming Trademark Violations For AdWords
from the when-will-these-lawsuits-stop? dept
There have been so many baseless lawsuits against Google for selling trademarked keywords as part of its AdWords program, that you would think lawyers would recommend against even bothering. Google always wins -- as it should. First of all, despite what some people believe, trademark does not give you complete control over the mark. The purpose of trademark law is to avoid consumer confusion. More recently the whole "dilution" theory has been tacked on to trademark law as well, but that is still somewhat limited. Beyond that, if there is consumer confusion in an AdWords ad, Google is still the wrong party to sue. Instead, the liability belongs on whoever created the confusing ad.While a lot of the more recent such cases have been from smaller companies, a lot more attention was paid to the news that language software firm Rosetta Stone sued Google over this issue last year. Eric Goldman, who's been tracking all of these types of lawsuits against Google, has a detailed discussion on the judge's ruling throwing out Rosetta Stone's case and giving a pretty complete victory to Google. Goldman notes that there are a few problems with the ruling, but it gets the big questions right. Now, hopefully, lawyers and companies will finally start to realize there's nothing illegal about Google selling ads on your trademarked terms.
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Filed Under: adwords, trademark
Companies: google, rosetta stone
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Hrrm
More like, from the when will they stop paying lawyers who keep billing for busy-work dept.
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Seems like it - and this one, is obviously a bad one.
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Rosetta Stone vs Google
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Bad Business
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