Google Sued For Trademark Infringement By American Airlines Over Sponsored Ads

Eric Goldman reports that American Airlines is suing Google over trademark infringement in AdWords.

As Eric points out, this type of lawsuit is nothing new to Google. Many companies have taken Google to court for allowing advertisers to bid on their trademarked names. However, in this case, American Airlines, the two words, are extremely generic names – although American Airlines, the company, is an extremely popular and well known trademarked brand name.

I skimmed through the large PDF complaint and found the keywords in question on this lawsuit. They include (see starting on page 21):

• American Airlines
• American Airlines Deal
• Free AA Travel Offers
• americanairlines.com
• AmericanAirlines
• American Airline
• AmericanAirlines Com
• www.americanairlines.com
• American Air Lines
• and others

They then go through how searches on the word Google and misspellings of Google do not return any results.

The filing then shows how Google’s keyword suggestion tool shows these keyword suggestions for the American Airlines trademarked terms.

Eric Goldman feels this lawsuit is “not a good lawsuit for American Airlines to bring.”

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He 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.