Now Google May Have Lost The Froogle Name Too…

Legal Issues

from the so-many-naming-problems dept

It appears that Google has been having an awful lot of trouble lately with the names of its services and trademark issues. There was the company in the UK that complained they were using Gmail already when Google’s Gmail came out. Then, there was the whole attack of the alien Googles thing earlier this month. Now, it turns out they have lost an attempt to take away the domain name Froogles from a guy who runs a shopping site there (which I imagine just had its traffic shoot through the roof, for all he complains about how troublesome this lawsuit is). Of course, Google runs a shopping site called Froogle. However, in this case, the challenge was whether or not the name Froogles was confusingly similar to Google (not Froogle). There’s a pretty good reason for this. Froogles went online well before Froogle did, so if anyone has a claim it might be in the other direction. The fact that Froogles was not found to be confusingly similar to Google could open up the possibility of a reverse case where the owner of Froogles could claim that Froogle violates his own trademark. Yes, the lawyers are drooling. Of course, the most likely solution is that Google will end up paying off this guy and just buying the Froogles domain name to avoid all these other problems. In the meantime, it’s a bit amusing that a Google search on Froogles doesn’t have the Froogles.com site anywhere near the top (however, before the conspiracy theories start, Yahoo’s search doesn’t either).