Word of the Day: undecimal - in eleven parts
|
|
|
It's open season on company search terms
IT IS PERFECTLY LEGAL to bid on company keywords for the purpose of driving traffic to a website, according to European regulators.
The European Court of Justice has ruled that it is okay for firms to buy up keywords that relate to other companies in order to lead web users to their own websites.
This might be bad news for some firms that make it their business to buy up as many keywords as possible that relate to their brands. BP for example has been buying up barrel loads of keywords and domain names ever since its runaway oil well blowout started destroying the Gulf of Mexico.
In fact, BP has probably sponsored more links than it has friendly photo opportunities, but it is not the subject of this item. At issue here are two portable cabin firms that fell out over the web use of the term Portakabin.
Apologies if this gets confusing but Portakabin itself complained that Primakabin was making merry with the term in question, as well as some other similar looking and sounding terms - like Portacabin. Portakabin wasn't happy with this and took Primakabin to a Dutch court cabin which handed over the trademark issue to the European Court of Justice cabin.
Probably sick to death of the sight of the word cabin and its many incarnations, the court ruled that this was just fine.
In its summary, the court said that it "cannot find that the ad gives the impression that the reseller and the trade mark proprietor are economically linked, or that the ad is seriously detrimental to the reputation of that mark, merely on the basis that an advertiser uses another person's trade mark with additional wording indicating that the goods in question are being resold, such as 'used' or 'second-hand'."
The ruling cements an earlier precedent set in Google's favour when it fell out with bling luggage firm Luis Vuitton. µ
Share this:
Share
I think this may be a mistake. Although if I search for Trade-Mark then it may be okay to show me third-party resellers of Trade-Mark's products - it isn't the same thing as showing me Brand-Mark, the main competitor to Trade-Mark. I think that currently nothing much stops Brand-Mark from buying the Google, Bing, Ping, or Froyo rights to the name "Trade-Mark", when it is really meant to be somebody else's.
Incidentally, I'd guess that LUIS Vuitton is the knockoff possibly from Portugal or Spain, but in the course of substantiating that I managed to spell the second half "Vitton", which is what it sounds like anyway, plus I'm a bloke and what would be wrong is if I DID know the right spelling.