Keyword Use Was Not Trademark Infringement
June 14th, 2010 by adminA Canadian college has been permitted to use another’s business name as a trigger for search engine adverts, a court has ruled. The Canadian court stated that the laws in place on misleading advertisements should be used to prevent the use of a different organisations name because it did not create confusion to users.
The dispute was between Vancouver Career College (VCC), which ran courses under different business names, and college regulator the Private Career Training Institutions Agency (PCTIA). The PCTIA argued that VCC had paid for its advertisements to appear when online users entered a competitors name into the relevant search engine tool. The PCTIA believed that this paid advertising campaign amounted to misleading advertising to online users.
Although it had been recorded that these paid adverts had caused confusion to potential students with competing colleges appealing to the PCTIA, the court opposed this standpoint.
Instead, the court said that Vancouver Career College ought not to be prohibited from using advert triggers due to the fact there was sufficient information available to enable prospective students to make a distinction from one college to another.
It is believed that this instance was the first of its kind in Canada. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has received numerous requests to create rulings on the trade mark inferences of one company’s use of another’s brand name to advertise their own products and/or services.
Earlier this year the ECJ ruled that Google’s own keyword advertising system, called AdWords, does not itself violate the rights of a trademark owner when their trademark has been used by another company as a keyword.
However, in regard to the above, some companies making use of another’s trade mark may infringe those trademark rights and subsequently, the trade mark owner may have cause to prevent Google, or any other search engine, from using the trade mark as a keyword.
Google is an information provider only. The result of this means that it is unlikely they shall ever be directly responsible for a trademark infringement performed by one of its users.
The European Court of Justice has said that an organisation using another’s trademark may only be guilty of trademark infringement to owners of the trademark company if the advert has caused confusion amongst users and the origin of goods or services sold.
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