Google France fined for trademark violation

TalkBack 2 of 8:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

this story is not about "chauvinism"

Also the article does not argue anything between a US company and a French one: Google France is a French company, which buys and uses the Google technology under license from Google US, which holds some shares from it. The court ruled against Google France, i.e. a French company, that is supposed to respect the French copyright laws, even if in that case this seems quite excessive:

the affair is on the common terms like "bourse des vols" which should not be a trademark as it is common French language, with just an association between 2 significant words. The trademark is made not on the terms themselves, but on their association, but this is quite excessive as it is ridiculously small.

However, it is quite similar to the title of books, which are protected in their domain only (book titles), because they are considered cultural products and this elligible to intellectual or artistic property rights.

The fact that it comes to the Internet keywords is strange: the court recognizes that a couple of common terms used in a private search engine is an intellectual or artistic property; not doing so would mean that it would be illegal to simply sell keywords in a private database.

My opinion is that a private database, even if it is used to create a public access service, is still private and its content (as long as it does not violate legal privacy limits) is free for its authors. So Google France should have the right to do what it wants in its database, unless there's a contractual agreement with its customers or commercial offers to use a policy aligned to the copyright rules.

I think that Google France will appeal of the decision, simply because I don't think there's such breach of contractual terms in its commercial offers.

However, Google France should communicate more precisely to its visitors that its results are biased according to external agreements, independant of the visitors. This is not visible in the Google Search page, but this problem has nothing to do with violation of intellectual proprerty rights on which the court just decided (and the court did not act in favor of groups of visitors).

So we are not speaking about "monopole", but "abuse of dominant position", in which customers (visitors of Google) are required to accept unbalanced conditions from Google.

I would say the same thing for Google US, and I do think that a US court could study and act in favor of other competing US web search engines, which cannot fairly use such unbalanced terms for their visitors, which are lead (in search result pages) predominently to web sites paying Google.

If this practice of selling keywords is exclusive to Google in US, then there's a monopole because only Google can successfully sell keywords to drive visitors to paying web sites, without informing visitors that they are biased and directed according to Google's own marketing objectives.

Posted by: PhilippeV   Posted on: 10/17/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
• Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now