Judge refuses to dismiss Google trademark suit

Judge rules the public has an interest in whether the company's popular pay-per-click advertising system violates U.S. trademark law.

The story "Judge refuses to dismiss Google trademark suit" published April 19, 2007 at 4:45 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[Neotrope]

Issue has impacted my business

I think the judge is entirely correct; I recently ran the gauntlet with this issue where an upstart company was spending thousands of dollars to have their ad appear everytime my one-word registered trademark *Send2Press" would show up in any content matches online, and in Google. I am now having to spend money each month to outbid this company so that when somebody looks for my content on a social network, there isn't a competitor's ad mixed in with my content thanks to Google. On the other hand, Yahoo! was very accomodating and took care of the issue in there system. Google's trademark policy only precludes others from using your mark within the text of their ad, not buying up every instance of your brand everywhere on the web where Google serves ads, including content archives which contain copyrighted content under my brand name, including social networks. This is like every time Hugh Hefner writes an article, an ad for Larry Flynt is shown right above it, and that't not quite right. As a 28 year veteran of the PR, branding, and marketing field I recently wrote an article on my experience with this issuse, which I am shamelessly plugging here as it is directly related to what I went through in dealing with this problem with both Yahoo and Google in 2007. If you're curious, it can be found here: and is titled "Contextual Counter Branding: Your Pizza is My Pizza - Why Search Engines Want to Sell Your Trademark to Your Competitors" --
adindustrynewswire.com/2007/03/03/241_205157

It's unfortunate that Google doesn't seem concerned with public perception, intellectual property law issues, and the like. They really are starting to show the arrogance and "we can do no wrong" fallacies that made Microsoft less than respected by so many. While their work is admirable, it's not flawless.