Another French Court Rules Against Google On Trademark Claim

Google has been ordered to pay a total of €350,000 ($454,000) for violating two companies’ trademarks by allowing other companies to bid on those marks in AdWords in France. Google is appealing. According to a report in The Register:

When web users typed the trade marked terms ‘voyageur du monde’ and ‘terres aventure’ into Google they say the search results produced by Google were accompanied by adverts for those companies’ competitors.

The Court said that though the commercial harm was marginal it had denied the companies some customers by directing them to other sites, French newspaper Le Figaro reported.

Last year Google moved to liberalize its EU AdWords policies to bring them into alignment with US policy. That meant switching from a more restrictive approach that didn’t allow companies to bid on keywords associated with other companies’ brands and trademarks to one that did.

This move seems to fly in the face of a number of recent European lower-court decisions that disapprove of the policy. It will be up to EU courts of appeal to determine whether Google’s more liberal AdWords bidding policy can survive or whether the company will have to get back into the messy business of regulating which companies can bid on which terms.