Google wins legal battle over trademark searches

Internet giant Google today won a landmark legal tussle over the use of trademarks on the internet.

The European court ruling follows a series of courtroom battles, with international brands trying to control the use of their names.

Now the EU judges have declared that Google is not infringing trademark law by allowing advertisers to buy online keywords corresponding to their competitors’ trademarks.

The verdict came at the end of a four-year fight with luxury goods retailer Louis Vuitton, in a wrangle over the use of the Vuitton company name as a search word.

The Vuitton group luxury goods group had already won a French court action, successfully claiming that Google acted illegally by allowing other companies to use the Vuitton name as a key search words for adverts on Google.

But Google’s appeal ended up in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which declared today that the search engine was not breaking EU law by making trademarked keywords available to advertisers.

The judges said EU law entitled trademark owners, subject to certain conditions, to stop others using identical or similar signs “for goods or services equivalent to those for which those trade marks are registered”.

Under current Google policy, a user trawling the search engine’s “AdWords” service using trademarked keywords, finds advertisers’ names on screen under the heading “sponsored links”.

But in the case of many companies, searches with their trademarks have triggered the appearance of rival names under “sponsored links”.