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American Airlines And Google Settle Keyword Advertising Spat
from the too-bad-it's-secret dept
Despite lawsuit after lawsuit ruling in favor of Google whenever a company sued Google
because one of their own competitors was buying keywords based on their trademarks,
American Airlines decided to get in on the game as well. Since American Airlines was
probably the biggest company to take on Google in this manner, some undoubtedly were
hoping that it might actually be able to succeed. However, the two companies have now settled the
case. And, while the terms of the deal remain secret, Eric Goldman checked the ads on
Google and doesn't see anything that indicates that Google has changed its usual practice
of allowing non-confusing ads.
In other words, it sounds like American Airlines lawyers finally looked at the details of
earlier rulings and realized the company had close to no chance of winning this. A trademark does
not give the holder complete control over the use of the word, and a competitor using the
word for competitive advertising is completely legal, so long as they're not using it in a
way that is likely to confuse a consumer. Even more important, if there's any
liability, it should be on the other advertisers, not Google, which is merely the platform provider.
Reader Comments
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Great!
I just hope others pay attention here and realize that they're wrong to try and control bidding on their terms.
As somebody who works in marketing, I've received several of these C&D type letters with lawsuit threats. I'm tired of them.
The most absurd was somebody who had a trademark on "City Car Model" (like Detroit Pinto) who told us we couldn't use "Detroit Pintos" in our ads - even though we were running ads for a car dealership in that city - that sold those cars.
(obviously it wasn't detroit or pinto)
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tankyo
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