Google Makes Case for Selling Trademarked Keywords

The practice of buying a competitor’s trademarked terms as a keyword via Google’s AdWords has long been a source of controversy - Google and Rescuecom have been litigating the issue since September 2004 - but Google wants advertisers to be able to do exactly that, writes InformationWeek (via MarketingVox).

Google has laid out its argument for a federal judge, saying it does not infringe on the trademark of a company when it allows the company’s competitors to buy that trademarked term as a keyword. Google points out that the trademarked term is not used in the ad creative that the user sees, and that it’s used solely in the system’s background to trigger the ad’s appearance.

The brief filed by Google points to offline advertising and marketing practices, such as the display of competing products next to each other on supermarket shelves or coupons in a newspaper. Such placements are paid for and are part of a strategy to lure the attention of consumers from one brand to the other, in essence playing off the trademark of one company to bolster the image of a competitor. Such placements do not misrepresent the competitive product in question, and the situation is analogous to a keyword buy, Google says.

In its counter-argument, Rescuecom says consumers may be used to such real-world practices, but they cannot make such differentiations online. It says when a user submits a search based on a particular keyword, such as a trademarked name or term, the user expects both organic and paid results to be directly relevant to that search term.