Trademarks And PPC Advertisements

Trademarks And PPC Advertisements

A federal court gave a decision a week ago that merely using any company’s trademark to mislead customers in case of search engines for a paid headline of an advertisement is not accounted as an infringement of trademark of the company whose trademark is so used. But the decision also stated that if the trademark is a keyword for the search engines in popular sites like Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc., those keywords which are the trademark, cannot be bought by the advertiser. This decision was a result of a case against a jewellery company having national operation who had bid on keywords “dating ring” to promote the sales of the diamond rings that they manufactured. However, another company already had the trademark “The Dating Ring”. So when this keyword was entered by the users of search engines, the name of the national company, rather than the company who had acquired the trademark, cropped up to the users. 

In the case, the defendant’s argument was that it never actually had a trademark of ‘dating ring’ on product, nor did the website ever show up ‘dating ring’ as a feature of their diamond ring. But the court agreed that the defendant had made use of the term trademarked by the opponent in the advertisement of their diamond ring. 

So the decision given in this case makes using trademarks of competitors a costly affair. This makes it difficult for jewellery companies to use keywords on search engines as those might be trademarked by some other jewellery company; a fact which they may be unaware of. In the given case, the keyword ‘dating ring’ did not seem to violate any law as it is a common term, but simply, the national company was unaware of the terms being trademarked already. As said, trademarks protect the registered company against the trademark usage by any other company without prior permission. 

Still, it seems a bit unfair for small jewellery companies for promotion of their business as they will now have the need to conduct a detailed search even about general keywords to find out whether or not those have been registered as a trademark by any other big player in the market.

In the world of pay-per-click or PPC as it is commonly known, it is the general norm to purchase a few thousand keywords among the few thousands of them that get many visitors to the site, so this kind of a search can be pretty costly for jewellery manufacturers who need to buy keywords. The basic aim is to set up a sale, notwithstanding the site’s conversion. Just because a common term used for the purpose (‘ring’ in case of jewellery is a common term!) has been trademarked by a given company, using such a common term does not necessarily violate any trademark as far as the common man is concerned. But the law has a different opinion altogether!