Google Does It Again – Trademark Holder Protection To Go

I received an email yesterday from Google’s legal team, as I had previously lodged a trademark complaint regarding Adwords.

In order to maintain clarity here is the email in its entirety:

Hello,

We're writing to inform you that we're changing our trademark complaint procedure in the UK and Ireland. This change may affect how we handle the trademark complaint you currently have on file with Google.

If you've submitted a complaint letter requesting that we prevent
advertisers from using certain trademark terms anywhere in their ad text, we will continue our efforts to support your request.  However, from May 5, 2008, our trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in Google monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This will bring our procedure in line with the approach taken in the US and Canada. Complaints received on or after today will be processed
under our revised procedure.

You do not need to file your trademark complaint with us again unless you would like to amend it based on the new guidelines. For more detailed information regarding our trademark complaint procedure, we invite you to review our revised complaint procedure, posted online at
http://www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html.

To learn more about this trademark policy revision, please visit
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

Advertising Legal Support Team

The email is quite confusing. On the one hand they say they are going to uphold the previously lodged complaint, while on the other they say they're changing their policy to come into line with the one they use in the US / Canada. 

In order to make sense of it all I spent a bit of time digging around their "help" documentation to see if I could get a better idea of the implications.

From what I have been able to understand Google are basically giving trademark infringers carte blanche. The only thing you will now be able to complain about is trademark usage in the advert text. The actual triggers ie. keywords, will no longer be protected.

So what?

Well the problem is that people are just as likely to hit a competitor's ad based on a trigger as they are on text in the ad. In fact I'd reckon that the triggers are a lot more powerful than the ad text itself.

So what are a trademark holder's options?

At present I'm not 100% sure. I've contact our trademark attorney in the US to see if he can shed any light on the matter and offer any sane advice, but I imagine his response is going to be unhelpful. He's a great guy, but Google's policy change doesn't leave us with many realistic options.

Of course you wouldn't mind so much if what they were doing wasn't so problematic. Is it a coincidence that Google is constantly being sued by trademark holders exactly because of this kind of thing?
I think not.