With the advent of Internet Technology there has been a paradigm shift in the way we conduct business. Notwithstanding, the benefits, e-commerce has also brought with it a plethora of novel legal issues, many of which remain unresolved. Courts have spent innumerable hours in a bid to compress the vast and seemingly boundless world of Internet commerce into the restrictive confines of commerce laws originally developed for a brick-and-mortar marketplace. Trademark laws have proven particularly difficult to stretch into this emerging technological arena.
One of the most divisive trademark issues today is whether the sale of trademarks as “keywords” by Internet search engine companies constitutes trademark infringement. Courts in the United States, the United Kingdom and France are currently divided in opinion, but there are several high-profile cases pending which hopefully will provide some much needed clarity and resolution to this emerging …show more content…
v. Google, Inc. The plaintiff, a computer services franchise, filed suit against Google for selling the plaintiff’s trademarked name “Rescuecom” as a keyword to Rescuecom’s computer service competitors. In addition to selling the plaintiff’s trademark, Google, through its “Keyword Suggestion Tool” program, even “recommended Rescuecom to the plaintiff’s competitors as a keyword in order to make . . . their advertising more successful.” Despite this seemingly obvious infringement on the goodwill associated with Rescuecom’s trademark, the court dismissed this portion of the complaint with prejudice. The court held that because Google’s use of Rescuecom’s trademark to trigger sponsored links was “internal” and because there was “no allegation that Google placed Rescuecom’s trademark on any goods, containers, displays, or advertisements, or that its internal use was visible to the public,” the claim was not a trademark “use” under the Lanham