Originally Posted by
Efrem
This is perfectly OK. The requirement is that you have to have a legitimate business interest in the term. There is no requirement that this interest be unique, that nobody else can have one.
I think the point was that AA's claim was sort of like accusing a vendor of selling goods stolen from them while themselves purchasing goods that would stolen from others by the same logic. Either both are true or both are false.
While technically, I don't think AA has a case at all and the whole thing looks silly, perhaps Google needs this wake up call to stop pretending that abuse by their advertisers (with the misleading use of tradenames in their ads) don't happen and/or that they are not responsible at all for such abuse. They might be able to prevail over AA but if companies start to sue Google on a regular basis, that can affect their bottom line.
Since such abuses are short-lived and fleeting, it is not practical for companies to go after each such advertiser, especially when they tend to be small operations. So the only practical alternative is to make the publisher that provides this avenue responsible.
Google needs to create AND enforce a strong policy of non-trademark abuse in their competitor's ads, not because any law necessarily requires it but otherwise, they are antagonizing a large number of credible entities many of whom are profitable customers for Google. Hopefully, AA's goal is just to do that. The monetary loss to AA from such practices, I suspect, is very close to zero (if not zero) in reality but has the potential to grow if unchecked.
On the other hand, getting a few hundred million from Google as settlement, which (while pocket change for Google) can make AA's balance sheet look decidedly better, double or more their quarterly profits and make the management look like geniuses to justify a few more millions to the management from that settlement.
Brilliant, eh?