Google wins trade mark case in US over Adwords
In stark contrast to the Belgian case we reported on last week, Google has recently enjoyed a rare Court victory, this time in the USA.
Rescuecom complained that Google's Adwords facility, which allows competitors to pay for their advertisements to be brought up alongside the results of a search for a trade name, amounted to trademark infringement. Rescuecom's competitors could effectively "purchase" use of the Rescuecom trade mark, so that when a Google user searched for that phrase, the competitor's advertisement was displayed.
The New York Judge found that so long as the Rescuecom trade mark was not actually displayed in the competitor's advert, the only use was "internal" to Google and not visible to the publicm so it did not amount to infringement.
Courts elsewhere in the world, and even in the US, have taken a different view in similar cases, once again demonstrating the vagaries of the global jurisdiction of the internet.
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