Not exactly renowned so far for being a chatterbox, the barely-known mastermind of adult search engine Booble has one message for Google, which has tried to get him to knock it off with parodying the look of the search kings' home page: "We will prevail."
BoobleBob told Webpronews.com that he believes Booble is dealing primarily with a knee-jerk response any company might make to suspected infringement, without seeing the possibility of parody. That, he told Webpronews, was how he read Google's recent cease-and-desist letter to Booble.
Booble's legal team, perhaps needless to say, fired back a defense in which they both rejected Google's demand that Booble turn over their domain to the search giant and defended Booble's right to parody Google or anyone else in the public sphere.
"In trademark law, parody is a defense to trademark infringement," Rich Ord of iEntry wrote to Google, saying the domain names were "entirely different." Booble offers only search results related specifically to adult entertainment, the now-familiar Booble mark differs in sound, appearance, and impression from Google's famous mark, Booble uses the phrase "adult search engine," posts warnings that the site contains explicit content, and disclaims any association with Google.
But Ord also noted that putting "porn" and "sex" in Google's engine brings back between the tens and the hundreds of millions of hits, compared to a mere 268 hits for "porn" and 291 hits for "sex" in Booble. "Therefore," he wrote, "the Google mark… is obviously not tarnished."
"The good news," BoobleBob told Webpronews.com, "is we have really good lawyers and we're making enough money to pay for them. The money the porn on the site is generating will go to fight Google."
Google slapped Booble with a cease-and-desist demand in January, practically 24 hours after Booble went on the cyberair. Trademark attorney Martin Schwimmer, in fact, argued at the time that Google's cease-and-desist – and the fact that Booble didn't comment on "the entitiy it's satirizing" – was evidence that Booble's site wasn't exactly a properly-defined parody.
Nonsense, BoobleBob told Webpronews.com. "I certainly don't think Google's entitled to any kind of injunctive relief," he said. "I don't think they can go to a judge and show how we're killing their business and that we've got to be stopped. We're just not that big."
