By Jan Libbenga for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), the
body which is responsible for European community trademarks,
rejected Google's appeal after a stiff battle with German-born
venture capitalist Daniel Giersch.
Giersch, who has held his trademark for six years, has been
fighting this battle since Google launched its email service in
2004. The German entrepreneur founded a same-day mail delivery
service called GMail designed to offer a swifter alternative to the
Deutsche Post.
Last year, a district court in Hamburg already handed Giersch
victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the
litigation and Google was ordered to remove all Gmail references
from its German service.
After the ruling, Giersch also announced lawsuits to defend more
recent registrations of the trademark in Switzerland, Norway and
Monaco.
Google has always argued the two names are not confusingly
similar. The company even offered to buy the trademark rights from
Giersch for $250,000, but the German entrepreneur declined. He
called Google's behaviour "very threatening, very aggressive and
very unfaithful".
In 2005, Google also had to rename its Google Mail service in
the UK where research firm IIIR claimed "Gmail" for its financial
analytics software in an out of court settlement with the search
giant.
© The Register
2007
