2d Circuit: Rescuecom Defeats Google's Motion to Dismiss (4/3/09)
When I first started watching these paid search lawsuits, I personally thought that they were non-issues. In several cases of companies suing the search engines for running competitor’s adds on the search engine results pages for a trademarked term, the search engines had won. A precedent had already been set from these cases, right? At least I thought so.
Now, that leads to this article that was published on Friday: Google Loses Round in AdWords Lawsuit.
To boil down the article to the sticky residue that remains, the 2nd Circuit federal appellate court overturned Google’s motion to dismiss the case for allowing the trademark “rescuecom” to trigger paid ads.
While this doesn’t mean that Google will lose the case, it is an interesting reversal since the case was originally dismissed by the district court on the grounds that allowing the keyword “rescuecom” to trigger paid advertisements did not violate trademark law because it wasn’t a use in commerce.
