RSSAmerican Airlines Sues Google Over AdWords
By Ed Oswald | Published August 20, 2007, 1:16 PM
Upset that advertisements for its competitors are appearing in searches for its trademarks, American Airlines parent AMR has sued Google seeking unspecified damages.
AMR says that ads for competitors' services appear when searching for its trademarked names, such as its “Aadvantage” frequent flyer program. The company says the ads appear alongside ads placed by the company itself in the ‘Sponsored Links’ section.
Such a practice could confuse American Airlines’ customers, AMR says, and could affect the company’s business. Google has been sued before under similar circumstances, but it is somewhat unusual for a company of this size to be a litigant. AMR tried to negotiate with Google to have the competitors' ads removed, however those talks were unsuccessful.
The only other company of AMR’s size to take on Google over its ad sales practices was Geico, which complained to a federal judge in Virginia that the search giant was letting competing insurance companies advertise under the search term “Geico.” The judge ruled in favor of Google in that matter.
Geico was still able to collect for damages as a result of competitors' ads with the company’s name in them, which it did so in 2005. In most other cases in the US, Google has come out on the winning end, however in France courts, have sided with the plaintiff companies.
Google had no public comment on the matter as of press time.
Kudos to American Airlines for bringing the suit. A lot of search marketers and agencies are ignorant to the significance of trademark protection, until they themselves have issues.
Search marketers seems to think that these trademark suits are fruitless, but that mentality couldn’t be farther than the truth.
In 2005, Google was forced to change their trademark advertising policy after a devastating blow from a federal district court in the Geico Case. The court stated:
“…the district court found that the “extremely high” percentage of respondents who experienced some degree of confusion when viewing these advertisements was sufficient to show that there was a likelihood of confusion present when GEICO’s marks appeared in either the heading or the text of a Sponsored Link advertisement.”
“Google advised the district court that it had no contrary evidence. Thus, the district court held that GEICO had established a likelihood of confusion and had therefore shown that Google violated the Lanham Act with regard to those Sponsored Link advertisements that included GEICO’s marks in the headings or text.”
Google then settled with Geico to avoid a tumultuous threat to their business model and quickly changed their trademark policy to reflect the wisdom of the court.
This issue is not going to go away, because trademark infringement in the ads of search is very real and damaging. If it rolls into a class action, the search engines will face astounding costs in compensatory damages. They are much better off updating policies to halt the brokering of trademarks–for once I agree with France.
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|Uh... I did a search for my company's GigaTribe (http://www.gigatribe.com by the way!) on Tucows recently and a competitors ad showed up instead of our listing, and the last thing that would cross my mind is to sue my competitor.
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|Kudos to American Airlines for bringing the suit. A lot of search marketers and agencies are ignorant to the significance of trademark protection, until they themselves have issues.
Search marketers seems to think that these trademark suits are fruitless, but that mentality couldn’t be farther than the truth.
In 2005, Google was forced to change their trademark advertising policy after a devastating blow from a federal district court in the Geico Case. The court stated:
“…the district court found that the “extremely high” percentage of respondents who experienced some degree of confusion when viewing these advertisements was sufficient to show that there was a likelihood of confusion present when GEICO’s marks appeared in either the heading or the text of a Sponsored Link advertisement.”
“Google advised the district court that it had no contrary evidence. Thus, the district court held that GEICO had established a likelihood of confusion and had therefore shown that Google violated the Lanham Act with regard to those Sponsored Link advertisements that included GEICO’s marks in the headings or text.”
Google then settled with Geico to avoid a tumultuous threat to their business model and quickly changed their trademark policy to reflect the wisdom of the court.
This issue is not going to go away, because trademark infringement in the ads of search is very real and damaging. If it rolls into a class action, the search engines will face astounding costs in compensatory damages. They are much better off updating policies to halt the brokering of trademarks–for once I agree with France.
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|I've seen this happen with my own product and it's very annoying. If you type the name of my product into Google, one of the ads that shows up prominently displays the name of my product and then suggests that it's no good and that you should try their product. But the way they do it gives no indication to the consumer that that ad is NOT for our product....so they're leveraging our well known name to push their product and confuse the consumer. That's totally wrong, and I can see why American would object to a similar situation.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the value of company's protected intellectual property (including Trade Names).
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|I went shopping looking for tomatoes and saw an advert for potatoes. I'm so confused. Now what do I buy?
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|Learn to read!
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|I'm not sure how this would be any different than Samsung making a deal with Best Buy so that when a consumer comes in asking for a Sony, the sales rep tells him he should take a look Samsung instead. That type of thing happens all the time.
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|Good luck winning on this.
Search Java, and you will see C++ on the sponsor link.
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|French courts.
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