American Blind and Wallpaper Factory agreed to settle its four-year-old trademark dispute with Google out of court. American Blind had filed one of the first trademark cases revolving around Google's AdWords practices concerning trademarks, but it wasn't the last, and there are more in the works. Don't expect the search engine giant to change its behavior any time soon, however.
The suit was originally filed in 2003, and would have gone to trial in November in the US District Court for Northern California. We'll get to the full details of the resolution in a moment, but first I want to cover a little "history." This will give you the background for why this kind of case matters to Google -- and why the search engine wants to keep such disputes out of court.
The suit's filing coincided with a decision by Google to change the way it ran its advertising keyword business. When the search engine first came out with its AdWords service, it avoided letting advertisers bid on trademarked names. Perhaps realizing how much money it was leaving on the table, the company finally decided to allow advertisers to bid on trademarks -- even trademarks the advertisers themselves didn't own.
When Google made this decision, Sheryl Sandberg, the search engine's vice president of global online sales and operations, said that "By letting people restrict certain words, you're not getting the results that people expect from Google." This decision opened the door to a plethora of trademark infringement lawsuits. Google has not been too successful defending its practices in Europe; as an American company, however, it is most concerned with American court and precedent.
Here it has been more successful. For example, in a case involving Geico Insurance, the judge sided with Google, granting the search engine's motion for summary judgment. The judge stated that "as a matter of law it is not trademark infringement to use trademarks as keywords to trigger advertising," according to Michael Page, one of the lawyers who represented Google in that case. The motion was granted at the end of 2004, and many thought that Geico had an excellent case against Google.
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