What the Google AdWords case means for IP owners
01 April 2010
Seven years after LVMH sued Google over its AdWords programme, Europe’s top court has ruled that the search engine is not liable under EU trade mark law. But that’s far from the end of the story
Emma Barraclough
It is a dispute that pitted the old world against the new: a Californian high-tech search engine against a Parisian luxury goods company. But last month Europe's highest court ruled that Google had not breached EU trade mark law by allowing advertisers to bid on keywords trademarked by third parties.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJ) ruled on March 23 in three closely watched joined cases, including one brought by luxury goods company LVMH, referred to it by France's Cour de cassation. The Court said that a referencing service provider such as Google allows its advertising clients to use signs which are identical with, or similar to, trade marks, but does not itself use those signs.
It said that if a trade mark has been used as a keyword, the proprietor of that trade mark cannot rely, as against Google, on the exclusive right which it...
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