Search Engine Optimization News Blog

American Airlines filed a suit against Google last year for failing to protect their copyright. They claimed that the fact that Google allows competitors to purchase keywords that include trademarked phrases violates their rights, and sued the search engine.

The Orion case settled earlier this year was a stride I the right direction when it comes to the trademark infringement via use of keywords in advertising and search results. A judge ruled that results could not be brought up for such keywords if it resulted in misleading consumers.

In startlingly accurate legalese, the settled case stated that trademarked terms must be excluded in search, and advertisers could not use the keywords to advance their own agenda.

However, in the suit with Google, a step backward seems likely.

American Airlines asserted that “Google’s ‘Sponsored Links’ may instead redirect [searchers] to: (i) websites of airlines that compete with American Airlines; (ii) websites that sell air travel not only on American Airlines, but also on a variety of airlines that compete with American Airlines; or (iii) websites that are entirely unrelated air travel.”

This caused American to file the suit, but Google objected, stating that all they did was allow other companies to stock their product on the same shelf as American. American contended that it was more like slapping identical labels on them.

Nonetheless, even after a judge refused Google request to throw out the lawsuit, the case has been settled quietly and without fanfare.

So how far can competitors go? Does Google simply not care about copyright infringement as long as they can keep revenue coming in by encouraging a bidding war? As it stands, companies must fight just to get the keywords that specifically describe their company by name.

There is simply a lot more leeway than most would like to see, and suing the bidder only solves the problem short term. SuingGoogle keeps coming up as an option to crush the problem at it’s source, but seems futile.

The Viacom plaintiff so far seems to be the only one making a dent, but in reality their case against Google for copyright infringement in the matter of unauthorized YouTube content differs substantially from the advertising claims.

Google is being much more manageable - perhaps because the issue here is not their bottom line? When it comes to YouTube, hand over a few user records and bye-bye Viacom. Problem solved.

Perhaps American Airlines just couldn’t resist what Google put on the table to make them go away.