American Airlines And Google Settle Keyword Lawsuit

Jul 21, 2008 at 8:33am ET by Barry Schwartz

American Airlines Drops Google Trademark Lawsuit from Bloomberg reports that the two sides have settled the search ad legal dispute. Each side has agreed to pay their own legal fees and the terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

American Airlines sued Google about a year ago over trademark infringement in their AdWords product. In short, American Airlines did not want Google to allow advertisers to bid on the following terms: American Airlines, American Airlines Deal, Free AA Travel Offers, americanairlines.com, AmericanAirlines, American Airline, AmericanAirlines Com, www.americanairlines.com, and American Air Lines.

A few months after the suit was filed, Google asked a judge to dismiss the case but that request was quickly denied.

Eric Goldman thinks that Google “did not make any special concessions to American Airlines to block keyword ads on their trademarks.” I personally did some searches on the disputed keywords above. While most did not return ads from any third-party companies, some did return ads. So it is really hard to see who actually “won” this legal case.

The picture above is a Search in Pictures column via Brett Jordan of a concept of a billboard designed for American Airlines, which I doubt American Airlines used.


Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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