February 2005
The War Against Being Googled!
French luxury goods retailer, Louis Vuitton, has successfully challenged Google over its advertising programme "AdWords". The High Court in Paris awarded damages to Louis Vuitton and injunctions against all Google sites.
Google's advertising programme "AdWords" generates sponsored links alongside search results. These are advertisements for other web sites triggered by entering specific words or phrases into Google's search engine. While this form of targeted advertising can be worthwhile, trade mark owners are concerned about the growing trend of organisations sponsoring brand names belonging to competitors. Competitors can use or take advantage of another brand name and the goodwill they have generated in it. This means that customers searching for a particular company or brand might be diverted to rival advertising.
Google has been ordered to withdraw all sponsored search terms that breached AdWord trade marks owned by various companies and has been subjected to rather substantial fines. Legal proceedings have been brought against a number of search engines operating similar systems. To mention but a few, in January 2005, Google France was fined and ordered to withdraw all sponsored search terms that breached trade marks owned by a hotel chain, Le Meridien Hotels and Resorts. In January 2004, Netscape settled a 5-year-old claim for trade mark infringement brought by Playboy Enterprises. This related to Netscape's sale of banner advertisements triggered by the terms "playboy" and "playmate", both registered trade marks of Playboy, which claimed that this practice created consumer confusion and diluted its trade marked brands. As a result of a federal appeals court ruling that it could be held liable for the unauthorised use of trade marks, a settlement was reached. In October 2003, Google had to pay damages for allowing advertisers to sponsor the terms "bourse des vols" (flight market) and "bourse des voyages" (travel market), which were registered trade marks of the travel agencies Luteciel and Viaticum.
BRIFFA Comment:
Online visibility, particularly presence in web searches, is a key area of marketing strategy. Search engine results greatly influence shoppers' online destination. Companies are therefore willing to pay search engines to boost their ratings in the search results or to target advertisements at search engine users.
In the absence of any clear legal guidance, all businesses would be well-advised to monitor the online activities of their competitors. This should include checking the major search engines and directories for any strange results appearing in searches for your brand names. Otherwise, companies could find that sales leads from the increasingly important source of search engines are being misdirected.