More than 200 million times a day, people use Google and its partner sites to find what they are looking for. AdWords lets anyone create an account and choose particular words to sponsor in just 15 minutes. As the site says, " Type in your ad text. Select your keywords. Set your budget. Start seeing results." Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad text.
But many see Google's latest move – which applies to trade mark right in the US and Canada only – as a step too far because it raises the risk of trade mark infringement claims.
To date, Google has respected requests from companies that asked it to prevent their marks from being available for sponsoring. Now they can only contact Google after the event – i.e. when they discover someone taking unfair advantage of their brand.
According to Google's site:
"When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, we will only investigate whether the advertisements at issue are using the trademarked term in ad text . If they are, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term from the text of the ad and prevent the advertiser from using the trademarked term in ad text in the future. Please note that we will not disable keywords associated with trademark usage."
Rose Hagan, senior trade mark lawyer at Google, explained to Legal Media Group: "We've concluded that internet users aren't likely to be confused when they see ads and search results."
She added: "Trade mark law does not prevent every use of a trade marked word. There are exceptions for fair use or comparative advertising, for instance. The standard here is likelihood of confusion, and we don't believe that this will create confusion."
In fact, all marks are now available as keywords – with one exception, according to SearchEngineWatch.com: Google.
