Europe's Court of Justice has just made a ruling that could have wide-reaching implications for online marketing.
Companies using competitors' names as Internet advertising keywords are not infringing European trademark laws, according to the ruling. This is good news for users of the Google Adwords service.
The decision involves a case for the temporary cabin maker Portakabin and its competitor Primakabin. Primakabin chose the keywords 'portakabin', 'portacabin', 'portokabin' and 'portocabin' as its search terms for Google Adwords. The last three variations were chosen so that internet users searching for the company would not miss Primakabin's ad due to a minor spelling mistake.
The judgment by Europe's highest legal authority, accepted that when a user searches Google on the basis of one or more words, the search engine will display the sites which appear to best correspond to those words. It agreed that customers of Google's paid-for Adwords service may choose whichever words they want, within reason, without infringing trademark law.
The court ruling upholds a precedent set by the Google-Louis Vuitton case, when the latter claimed that its brand name triggered ads for companies selling counterfeit Louis Vuitton goods. The court in that case found that if Internet service providers were "neutral" about the content, then trademark law was not infringed.
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