The good news for Google: They won a big one December 15, with a federal judge holding their AdWords search engine doesn't break federal trademark laws. The not-so-good news for the search kings: That win came six days after they were slapped with a trademark infringement suit over Google Scholar.
Federal judge Leonie Brinkema turned down insurance giant Geico's claim that Google should be barred from selling ads to rivals that might show whenever a surfer using Google punches “geico” into the search box. “There is no evidence," Brinkema ruled, "that that activity alone causes confusion,” as Geico had claimed in its original litigation.
Brinkema's ruling "confirms that our policy complies with the law, particularly the use of trademarks as keywords,'' according to Google vice president and general counsel David Drummond. "This is a clear signal to other litigants that our keyword policy is lawful.''
There is still one issue in the Geico versus Google litigation yet to be decided – whether ads that pop up and use Geico in their texts also violate trademark law. Google says their policies bar advertisers from using trademark names in such ad texts and does what it can to block such violations from getting in anyway, holding the advertisers liable and not Google.
Brinkema agreed to continue the proceedings on that issue, according to published reports, but also said she would stop the trial to put a decision in writing on the confusion issue and encourage Geico and Google to settle on the popup issue.
Meanwhile, six days earlier, the American Chemical Society sued Google on confusion grounds as well, claiming the Google Scholar search tool violated an ACS trademark. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit wants Google to stop using "scholar" in the tool name, since it calls its own academic research search engine SciFinder Scholar.
The ACS insisted they don't object to the concept but to the name of Google Scholar, which is a free tool launched in November and indexes research already available to the public on the Internet. SciFinder Scholar, on the other hand, lets users search previously published academic research and requires a license agreement to use.
