Louis Vuitton was defending a successful complaint against
Google for unfair competition and advertising practices and breach
of trademark laws. It won the case in February 2005 and Google
appealed. The Court of Appeal ruled that the original verdict
should be upheld, and that fines levied against it would be
increased.
The case concerned Google's AdWords advertising system. Louis
Vuitton said that Google was allowing adverts for counterfeit
Vuitton goods to be displayed alongside search results for the
genuine article.
The court ruled that this amounted to a trademark infringement,
and that Google must now pay €360,000 to Louis Vuitton for the
breach of its intellectual property rights, a substantial increase
on the €200,000 imposed on them in the 2005 judgment before the
Civil Court of Paris.
Louis Vuitton, a company famed for the distinctive "LV" logo
featured on its products, argued that, rather than being a research
tool for individuals, Google was an advertising and marketing
service for companies.
It may now use this principle to press for restrictions to be
placed on the use of the Louis Vuitton name across more than 130 of
Google's sites worldwide, as it has successfully done in relation
to websites accessible from France, a source close to the company
told the International Herald Tribune.
Any such case will have to deal with a series of different legal
environments, since each Google site operates principally for the
country featured in its domain name.
Google was quick to play down the significance of the case.
"This is an old Adwords case concerning events dating back to
2003," said a company statement. "Since then, as is widely
recognised on the market, Google has set up efficient policies and
processes to prevent the unauthorised use of registered trademarks
as well as forbid the use of AdWords to advertise for counterfeit
products. Today's case does not raise any new issues in this
respect".
