October 16, 2003

A French court has ruled against Google France in an intellectual property dispute, saying the company must pay a fine for allowing advertisers to tie their text notices to trademarked search terms.

The Lower Court of Nanterre required Google France to pay 70,000 euros (about $81,400) to two companies that owned the rights to certain words. Google France sold the use of these words to advertisers through its AdWords program. AdWords permits individuals and companies to place advertisements on the Google home page that appear when a specific search term is used.

A spokesman for Google said Wednesday that the company would appeal. "As this is an ongoing legal matter, we cannot provide further comment," spokesman David Krane said.

Travel agencies Luteciel and Viaticum sued Google in December 2002, after the search company refused to curb the use of disputed words in the AdWords program.

Luteciel and Viaticum claimed intellectual property rights in "bourse des vols" and "bourse des voyages," which roughly translate to travel market and airflight market.

The French court concluded that Google France violated the country's intellectual property code that, translated, "prohibits, in the absence of authorization of its owner, the use of a trademark for products or services identical to those indicated in the recording."

Source: C-Net News

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.