Rosetta Stone Sues Google For Trademark Infringement
By Anna Johnson on July 16th, 2009Language learning company, Rosetta Stone, has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia against Google for alleged trademark infringement.
Rosetta Stone alleges that Google allowed third parties – including software pirates – to purchase the right to use trademarks owned by Rosetta Stone, or other terms confusingly similar to Rosetta Stone’s trademarks, in Google’s Adwords advertising program.
Surely Google saw this coming. And it can expect to see more companies bring trademark infringement lawsuits against the company, since it introduced its somewhat liberal advertising policy in June 2009. That’s when Google introduced a new advertising policy allowing advertisers to use trade-marked words and phrases in their Google Adwords advertising text, even if they don’t own or have permission to use such trademarks.
Rosetta Stone’s general counsel, Michael Wu, said in a press release that Google was effectively “helping third parties mislead consumers and misappropriate Rosetta Stone trademarks by using them as keyword triggers for paid advertisements and by using them within the text or title of paid advertisements.”
Mr Wu added that Google and its advertisers financially benefitted from trading off the goodwill and reputation of Rosetta Stone.
In its lawsuit, Rosetta Stone is seeking, among other things, an injunction to stop Google from selling the Rosetta Stone trademarks or other terms confusingly similar to such trademarks for use in Google Adwords.
May 25th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
We are having this same problem. We have complained to Google many times. Google does not honor their own policy. They sell our Trade Mark as Keywords and they also allow advertisers to Use our protected Trademark as the Banner for their paid advertisements. Our Registration is International Class, Yet Google insists that we prove our trademark rights in every country. We can only assume that Google is unfamiliar with the Madrid protocol or they just ignore it. Google is in fact deriving profit by the sale of Trademarks belonging to others. They really should be ashamed of themselves for encouraging and profiting from Trademark Piracy.